S4 Ep10 - Instructional Spring Cleaning - Timers During Classroom Fluency Work

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Well, hello there and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania, the land of the Palawa people.

In this latest mini-series, I've been doing a little bit of spring cleaning. So far, we've looked at the idea of classroom news for oral language development and one student coming up to the front of the room during phonics lessons.

Today, I'm sharing my thoughts on something that impacts all grades in the primary school, that is, using timers during classroom fluency practice. This practice is becoming more widespread and is a feature of some phonics programs. Essentially, a timer is used while students are reading with a partner, depending on the program or advice. The timer is used in a variety of ways. It could be to track the length of the session, it could be to indicate a swap over point in the reading, or it could be as a prompt to encourage students to read faster.

I first encountered this practice a couple of months ago in two separate schools, and when I saw it I was a bit taken aback. Actually, that's not quite true. I first encountered this several years ago in a school I was working in and I pretty quickly knocked it on the head. I felt that it was putting a lot of pressure on the students and it was unnecessary, but I didn't have a good research understanding of it back then.

Timing during assessment is a must. It's a way to measure accuracy and automaticity. Without timing during reading assessment, the data just isn't reliable. But as a classroom practice, I've actively avoided it and discouraged others from using it and, as I said, I just felt that it put a lot of pressure on students.

When I saw this in the classroom recently, I thought, "Whoa, hang on, no, no, no, we don't do that". And then I paused because if I'm going to be making a recommendation or suggestion of something, I'd like to be able to do so with some evidence to go along with that advice. So I got reading. I wanted to know if this was one of those times when I had a belief or if I was accurate in my thinking, and I think we can all recognise times where we've had either one of those things happen. This resulted in many hours of reading and exploring to figure out what was what in this timed reading situation.

The difficult news here is that there isn't one easy answer for every circumstance for every student. Well, if we're honest, there never is. So we need to be clear in our own minds about what is and isn't evidence-based and under what circumstances a practice is most appropriate to meet a particular need.

Fluency

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of my reading and some recommendations, let's quickly review the concepts around fluency.

Firstly, fluency isn't an activity that we do.

It's not something that we teach in a standalone task.

It's largely the byproduct of other things done well and has three components: accuracy, automaticity and prosody.

Accuracy is pretty self-explanatory and is an aspect of reading we've always measured, even those schools still using benchmark assessments are measuring accuracy.

The next element is automaticity. This is about how quickly and effortlessly students can lift the words from the page. It's where the idea of reading rate comes into play and why reading assessments and screeners are timed. Without knowing how many words a student read in a set time, we can't assess automaticity. Using a combination of accuracy and rate, we arrive at a score of words read correctly per minute.

It's important to know that this notion didn't arrive in education with Dibles. It's been a feature of quality, normed tools for a very long time. Text-level fluency isn't the start of the journey. While text-level reading supports automatic word-level reading, accurate word-level reading through sounding out is necessary for effective text-level reading. Further, accurate word-level reading is highly dependent on student knowledge of the alphabetic code and morphemic structures, as well as spelling rules and well developed phonemic awareness. All of this is interlinked.

The third element of fluency is prosody. While words correct per minute is an unambiguous measure of reading fluency, prosody is not so easy to pinpoint and score. Prosody includes phrasing and expression, with elements of this relating to punctuation use, adjustment of pace for different purposes, changing your voice during dialogue and placing emphasis on particular words in a text to achieve an effect.

Reading aloud is a multifaceted undertaking.

If you're a Resource Room member you have access to the course "Milestones of Early Reading Development", where we have explored all of this and examined research around the link between things like punctuation and comprehension, as well as other skills and understanding students develop on the road to becoming a proficient reader.

So we can already see from this explanation of fluency that addressing fluency is not as simple as just whacking a timer on during some partner work in our classrooms and sitting back while the results appear. The nuanced conversation here is about what kind of experiences do students need to develop fluency at different points in reading development. That might involve a timer, it might not.

Onto the Research

Let's turn our attention now to some research to help inform our decision making.

Remember, evidence-informed practice involves three components:

• The research,
• Decisions about our practice based on our experience as teachers,
• And the experience of the end user, the students.

Often we're looking at formal data, but we're also looking at our observations about how the students react to different tasks. It's important to know that our preferences or feelings never override the finding of robust research when we have it, but they are an important consideration when we are implementing practices.

So when I went down the rabbit hole of reading about using timers during whole class fluency practice in the primary school, guess how many papers I found? Not one.

I read from sources such as Tim Rasinski, Jan Hasbrouck and Louisa Moats. I searched databases for articles and papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Now, if you have a paper that meets these conditions, as in students learning to read, particularly in the early years in the primary school classroom, please get in touch and send through what you have and I'll make an update to this episode.

There are plenty of papers and articles about repeated reading at class level, absolutely. But I just couldn't find anything about timing during whole class lessons in the primary school.

There was a paper called "The Effect of a Timed Reading Activity on EFL Learners: Speed, Comprehension and Perceptions", and EFL there stands for English as a Foreign Language. This was from 2010, but the participants in the study were university students who were learning English as an additional language. They had high levels of spoken vocabulary, and presumably high levels of accuracy in word level reading, so that one didn't hit the mark for me.

Not finding research about timing during whole class primary lessons, I looked for intervention studies and recommendations from experts and guess what? I found some.

So what did they say?

The first paper I'd like to share is from Grunke, Karnes and Hisgen, called "Effects of Explicit Timing on the Reading Fluency of Third-Graders with Learning Challenges". This paper described a study conducted in 2019 in Germany and involved four students. Yep, that's not a typo, four students. We have to understand that these smaller scale intervention studies often involve very small sample sizes, meaning that we have to be very careful not to read too much into them, and we certainly aren't going to rush out and change practice based on the findings of one of them, but we can build our own knowledge to inform decision making in what we learn. The students in this study were all accurate decoders who spoke German as a second language. The study lasted for four weeks and results were measured using correct words per minute.

The intervention in the study was delivered one student at a time, with repeated reading within a text when there was an error, but the texts themselves were not read in their entirety multiple times. A timer was used and results were graphed at the end of each reading session. These researchers found that while results improved during the timed reads, they didn't stick once the timer was turned off. There wasn't a suggestion in the paper of why this occurred, but for me I think it has some interesting things to indicate about attention. Maybe, and I'm completely guessing here, but maybe part of that was that while the timer was on, the student's attention was focused and that made their reading more accurate. But I don't know. You make up your own mind about what you think might have been happening.

But I just want to say that us having a bit of a guess about what might be happening is not evidence that we should change our practice.

There were other examinations of fluency development practices in intervention studies that involved timing, but these all involved the student reading one-on-one with an adult. There were many more studies about repeated reading showing positive impacts on student outcomes.

What I did find curious was the number of articles about timed reading that cited a program or publication where it was included. When I read this I thought there are plenty of examples of people doing this, but I'm not convinced of the research basis for it in the classroom with 25 six-year-olds. My question is, is this one of those practices that has become familiar without a super strong evidence base? And because it's common in programs that are largely evidence informed, have we just assumed that the practice is also evidence-based?

An example of this is from Hudson, Lane and Pullen. They published an article on the Reading Teacher in 2005. In this article, the authors described a timed reading protocol, and I'll read briefly from that article now.

"Timed readings are conducted using books or passages the student has read before. They are at an independent reading level (i.e., books the student can read with 95% accuracy or above)."

Hmm, so they aren't recommending timed reading with texts that the students can't decode. That's interesting. It's also worth noting that the protocol they shared involved an adult and a child in a one-on-one situation. This article did cite timed reading as being part of a program. It also said that program has been examined and been shown to be effective. But again, I'm still not convinced of the blanket application of timed reading in the classroom, based on what I'm seeing.

Similarly, an article on Reading Rockets about timed reading features some of these same recommendations. Their notes on differentiation are as follows:

• Encourage students to become familiar with the strategy before introducing a stopwatch.
• Begin with materials that are familiar to the student.
• Use repeated reading as practice for the timed repeated reading. Have students read passages aloud several times, while receiving feedback and guidance from an adult.
• Have the adult or a more proficient student read the passage. Then have the student read the passage.
• Teach students to be proud of their own progress and not compare it to others. Keep scores private.

Familiar text that the student can decode, the timing is used to monitor progress as part of a larger structure involving repeated reading, receiving feedback and guidance from an adult. None of this is about whole class fluency practice.

I've linked to the articles and studies in the show notes of our website for this episode. Don't just take my word for it, have a look and see what you think.

Classroom-level Implications

Now let's move on to the classroom-level implications for this practice. The first thing to remember is that the type of fluency practice and the type of reading material students need will depend on their stage of reading development. If students are perfectly fluent, prosodic readers, repeated reading does nothing for them. If they don't have a high level of accuracy, they need to work on phonics and morphology to build that accuracy. So we have to remember that the needs of the students in our class will be different and the fluency measures we undertake also need to be a little different.

Fluency, like everything else, is not a one-size-fits-all undertaking in every circumstance.

The second thing relates back to what I saw in one of the classrooms I was in, in particular. When you add a timer and say go, students are going to rush. They just are, and I'm sorry, but simply telling them not to rush and to slow down and read nicely isn't going to do a thing. We are hardwired to go quickly when stopwatches, timers and the word go are in the mix. Try having a sports carnival without them. And when the rushing starts, accuracy drops, as does the level of attention that's given to comprehension.

The next thing is that they're going to compare themselves to others. For students who struggle in this area, that is a nightmare. Sitting students with reading difficulties and/or anxiety down every day and pressuring them to read faster could very well lead to some well-being issues for those students. The whole issue of reading faster is problematic.

Jan Hasbrouck, whose research has given us robust norms for correct words per minute, says that the aim is for students to reach the 50th percentile. There is no virtue at all in asking a student who is confidently reading the 80th percentile to read faster, and the answer here is likely to increase the complexity of the text to pose more challenge, but remember, if the student doesn't have a fluency problem, fluency work is a waste of time. What we should be doing is engaging students in robust, wide reading opportunities, including during text-based work, and folding in prosody to that work where we have time and space to bring meaning to the picture.

When it comes to partner work for the little people, we need to align reading material with the student's skill development.

If I can't blend words on my own, I shouldn't get a text.

If I can't blend words on my own, I shouldn't be learning high-frequency words, and that's related to the work of Anne Castles and colleagues.

So popping a text of even one or two sentences in front of me when I don't have strong code knowledge and I don't have strong phonemic skills is unfair and it is not going to lead to great outcomes.

Remember, it's not a one size fits all approach that's needed.

The other suggestion that I've seen is to set a timer for a minute and then, when the timer goes off, the students swap over and their partner reads. Hmm, I'm not sure about this one for a few reasons.

Firstly, it feels like chaos. Trying to get everyone's attention four or five times during a reading experience and then having them all reading again at the same time feels like we're constantly breaking their focus. And if we aren't doing that, what are we doing? Are we just yelling at them to swap over and hoping for the best?

Now I will acknowledge that different schools from different backgrounds are going to have different experiences here. This is where the application of the research becomes context-specific. Remember, the findings of robust research are not context-specific, we can apply them to everyone, but how we make things happen may differ from one school to another. We just have to know why we're doing what we're doing and what we want kids to get out of it, and if something isn't working, if we've done our darndest, if it's still not happening, feel free to make a change.

The other thing with this is that if we're strict with it, it's likely that we'll be cutting kids off mid-sentence. This has a couple of implications. Firstly, it's just not enjoyable. Secondly, kids may feel that they've been cheated because they couldn't finish. Thirdly, it's quite difficult to attend to any kind of meaning when you can't finish the sentence that you're on and get a sense of the ideas being communicated in the text.

Comprehension monitoring is a really important early comprehension strategy we need to teach, and if kids are often not able to get to the end of the sentence, how do they monitor whether what they've read actually makes sense?

A signal to swap partners isn't a bad idea, though, and there are a few different ways to do it. The simplest way if students are reading a book is that you just swap over at each page, and early decodables don't have much text, so the child's not waiting for very long. I would recommend one between two, and one points for the other. Another way that works when texts get longer is for students to swap over at the end punctuation of sentences.

So should we use a timer during whole class fluency practice or not? Well, for me the answer is no. However, I'm not saying to throw the timers in the bin. We've heard today that research indicates positive benefits when timing is used in a certain way, but a big part of this in the research studies seems to be about feedback from an adult. Using a timer as an indicator of how much time there is left in that part of the lesson, as in when the timer goes off, reading fluency time is finished, is a great idea. It keeps you to time and makes sure that you can fit everything in.

The other time that a timer could be useful is in those one-on-one reading fluency intervention sessions after students have developed a high level of accuracy. No amount of repeated reading is going to help a student of any age be more accurate and fluent if they don't know the code. This practice is specifically for students who are accurate but slow in their reading, that's what the research papers are showing. Also, remember that, according to Hudson and colleagues, it's not every single read that is timed. It's the third or fourth read when students are now familiar with the text. The timing is then really being used as monitoring and feedback to the student. In all likelihood, this will be for students who are in Year three and beyond, and, of course, a timer is used during reading assessment to measure the number of correct words read per minute.

So, when it comes down to it, this spring cleaning episode, like the others, is about embracing the messiness of no one size fits all.

We know that there is some research to support timing during reading fluency development.

That research seems to indicate that the conditions for this practice could be:

• Students have a high level of accuracy in their reading.
• There is an adult there to directly support them and give them feedback.
• Students read the text to become familiar with it, and then they are timed.

This all boils down to this could be a practice for tier two support when you have an adult working one-on-one. Please don't go grouping your students in small groups so that you can time them and meet these conditions. That is not what we're talking about. In your regular classroom work, you can have a timer overall, but maybe just don't have it to tell kids to swap over and please do not ask them to beat their last time.

First comes accuracy, then comes speed. And for the vast majority of students, focusing on accuracy and automaticity with repeated reading is going to get them where you want them to be. For the others who need help in this area, there are protocols, as found by research, to help them in an intervention situation.

Listeners, I have no doubt that this episode is going to prompt some staff room discussions. Please know that I'm not intending to criticise any program or practice or suggest that I know best for your school. I'm also not criticising any person who promotes this. There is room for robust discussion within our profession and we have to be able to have those talks. It would be brilliant if there was just one way to tackle all of these questions and one answer that would lead us where we want to go, but there simply isn't.

Adopting an evidence-informed approach to instruction means that we have to sometimes rumble with the difficult ideas. We have to make the best decision we can, with the available evidence, consider the needs of the students in front of us, including through that lens of Cognitive Load Theory and Information Processing Theory, and monitor data to evaluate whether our choices have been sound for our students. There aren't any quick paths or quick fixes. There is only open, curious conversation and a willingness to grow in our practice.

And, as I've said, if you have papers sitting in a folder on your computer about timed reading being used at a whole class level in the primary school, please send them through.

I'm always growing in my knowledge too.

Until next time, happy teaching everyone. Bye.

References:

Chang, A. C-S. (2010).T he effect of a timed reading activity on EFL learners: Speed, comprehension, and perceptions. Reading in a Foreign Language, 22(2), 284–303.

Grünke, Matthias & Karnes, Jennifer & Hoff, Susanne. (2019). Effects of Explicit Timing on the Reading Fluency of Third Graders with Learning Challenges. Journal of Education and Training Studies. 7. 1. 10.11114/jets.v7i7.4014.

Hudson, Roxanne & Lane, Holly & Pullen, Paige. (2005). Reading Fluency Assessment and Instruction: What, Why, and How?. Reading Teacher - READ TEACH. 58. 702-714. 10.1598/RT.58.8.1.

Timed Repeated Readings  https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/timed-repeated-readings

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