Assessing reading fluency in elementary grades

This research was developed based on data collected by Escribo during regular School activities in 144 schools, both public and private, across all regions of Brazil. Students read “O Lobo e o Veado” short story. The test was recorded and sent to a database for evaluation of how the intervention influenced the development of the children's reading skills. This stage of the process aims to generate the dependent variable of our model, which we want to predict. For this purpose, the 600 selected audios were also evaluated by a specialist in the field, with the goal of measuring the students' fluency. The specialist evaluated each child's reading by examining several key aspects of their performance according to the rubrics. They looked at how effectively the reader used expression and varied volume to make the text sound natural, rather than simply reading word by word. Phrasing, whether the child was able to recognize sentence boundaries and modulate intonation appropriately, rather than segmenting the text into unnaturally short phrases, was also rated. Additionally, they assessed the smoothness of the reading, checking for excessive pauses, hesitations, or repeated attempts at difficult words or phrases. Finally, the rhythm of the reading was evaluated to determine if the child maintained a steady, conversational pace or if the speed was uneven. This holistic approach allowed the raters to identify both the strengths and areas for improvement in each child's reading performance. The evaluator also used tags to mark categories in the audios, such as: presence of other people's speech, very low audio, very poor reading, many background noises, did not read, etc. A tag is added whenever a problem is identified in at least one segment of the reading. Each of the human fluency evaluation categories was included in the table, with scores from 1 to 4, as well as the mentioned tags, with values of 0 for the absence of the tag or 1 for the presence of the tag in the reading.