The oral reading fluency (ORF) subtask measures how quickly and accurately a student can read. It is a core component of EGRA because it brings together lower-level reading skills (such as decoding and familiar word recognition) with how quickly and easily the student can read a given word (called automaticity). Students are given a short, 61-word, written passage on a familiar topic and were asked to read it out loud “quickly but carefully.”
The Extended ORF subtask follows the same approach as the ORF, but the students are given more than 60 seconds to read. In this EGRA, students were given 3 minutes. If the child could not read any of the first seven words in the passage, they were told to discontinue the test (and were given a score of zero words read). The EGRA administrator times the student, making note of any mistakes the student made while reading the words aloud. The score is reported as correct words per minute (cwpm), calculated using the longer duration rather than coming from the first 60 seconds of reading.
Zero scores represent the percentage of students who received a score of zero on a given subtask. Zero scores are often used for comparison purposes because they are logically equivalent across different languages.
High zero scores (25% and above) sometimes indicate where there is an EGRA subtask ceiling effect (i.e., students have not mastered lower-order reading skills). High zero scores can also help identify schools, districts, or education systems that need more support. Learn more about zero scores.
"2021, All Children Reading-Cambodia (ACR-Cambodia), COVID-19 Impact on Learning Study: Assessment Outcomes," Early Grade Reading Barometer, U.S. Agency for International Development, last modified April 19, 2022, https://earlygradereadingbarometer.org/results/Cambodia/ACR-Cambodia-2021/outcomes.
2021, All Children Reading-Cambodia (ACR-Cambodia), COVID-19 Impact on Learning Study: Assessment Outcomes. (n.d.) Early Grade Reading Barometer. https://earlygradereadingbarometer.org/results/Cambodia/ACR-Cambodia-2021/outcomes
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