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When Should a Student Exit
a Read Naturally Program?
Proper assessment and placement are the keys to a student’s initial success in Read Naturally. Careful assessment is also critical for deciding when a student is ready to exit Read Naturally. As a general rule, a student is ready to exit Read Naturally when his or her long-term fluency goal is met — reading unpracticed, grade-level material at a rate that is at least at the 50th percentile on national norms.
Many schools have established assessment plans that include doing benchmark fluency assessments three times per year using grade-level passages to measure student progress in terms of national norms. A benchmark assessment tool, such as Read Naturally's Reading Fluency Benchmark Assessor, can be used to screen students in the fall and to determine if a student has met his or her long-term fluency goal in the winter and spring of the school year. The Hasbrouck-Tindal Table of Oral Reading Fluency Norms provides norms for analyzing the results of oral reading fluency assessment scores.
A student begins using Read Naturally because he or she reads grade-level passages below the 50th percentile of national norms. Using the assessment scores, the national norms table, and any other relevant information, a teacher should create a long-term fluency goal for the student and a plan to meet that goal. That student should continue to work in Read Naturally until he or she can read grade-level material at or above the 50th percentile.
Progress in Read Naturally is monitored story-by-story at the student’s placement level; however, these scores alone should not be used to measure progress toward the ultimate long-term goal. Students listen to audio recordings of the stories and practice each story multiple times. So daily progress in Read Naturally will not reflect the level and rate at which a student reads unpracticed material. A student’s cold scores on stories are an indication of improvement on unpracticed material, but students may be working in a level of Read Naturally that is lower than their grade level.
A student who works in Read Naturally will typically need to be working in material that is at least half a year to one year above his or her grade level before he or she is ready to leave the program. Just because a fourth-grade student is working in level 5.0 does not mean that student has reached his or her goal. By administering benchmark assessments at grade level again in the winter and in the spring, progress can be measured in terms of national norms.