A Comprehensive Fluency Assessment Tool 

Oral fluency is an important skill at almost every grade level, but it can be difficult to tell where your students are at or how much progress they have made. Enter our fluency assessment tool! With multiple passages and easy-to-follow instructions, this tool will surely come in handy to gauge student reading ability. 

This resource includes: 

• Assessment instructions
• Fiction passage (color)
• Fiction passage (black and white)
• Fiction passage assessment tool
• Non-fiction passage (color)
• Non-fiction passage (black and white)
• Non-fiction passage assessment tool
• Fluency assessment checklist

These passages are at a typical 4th grade reading level, making this fluency assessment tool handy for 3rd through 5th grades, depending on student ability.

Administering Our Reading Fluency Assessment

This reading fluency assessment tool includes all the resources you will need to assess your students. Here is how to use it!

Instructions:

1. Provide the student with a copy of the text.
2. Before the student begins, let them read the text silently to themselves.
3. Have a stopwatch available to time the student while they are reading.
4. Ask the student to begin reading and start the timer.
5. Mark any uncorrected errors made by the student on the Oral Fluency Assessment Tool. Errors include mispronunciations, substitutions, reversals, omissions, or words pronounced by the examiner after a wait of 2-3 seconds (without an attempt from the student).
6. Use the Oral Fluency Assessment Checklist to calculate the student’s average words per minute and reading accuracy.
7. Rate the student’s expression and volume, phrasing and intonation, and smoothness on a five-point rating scale, ranging from poor to excellent.

For best results, administer both the fiction and non-fiction passages in this fluency assessment tool to get the clearest picture of student ability, as fluency can vary widely across genres. `

Download Our Oral Reading Fluency Assessment 

This oral reading fluency assessment is available in both PDF and Google Slides formats. Simply click the drop-down arrow on the download button to choose the format that works best for your classroom.  

This resource was created by Samantha Rose, a teacher in Florida and a Teach Starter collaborator.

Additional Reading Fluency Resources

We have many more reading fluency resources available for you to browse and download. Take a look at the sampling below!

teaching resource

3rd Grade Reading Fluency Passages

Assess student fluency with a printable pack of reading fluency passages for 3rd grade.

teaching resource

4th Grade Reading Fluency Passages

Assess student fluency with a printable pack of reading fluency passages for 4th grade.

teaching resource

Fluency Reading Passages - 5th Grade

Assess student fluency with a printable pack of reading fluency passages for 5th grade.