Leslie – This is an important question. You may be interested to know that many districts have moved away from comprehension goals and have focused IEP goals on the components of comprehension: decoding, vocabulary, and fluency. These schools include comprehension goals only when there are no concerns in these areas. If a comprehension goal is necessary or required, there are a couple of factors to consider. What type of text will be used to measure comprehension – grade-level, Lexile level, decodable text based on acquired skills, or a standardized text? Will the text be fiction, nonfiction, or both? Is the comprehension measure part of an assessment tool or program?

Developing measurable comprehension goals can be challenging. The first consideration is the area(s) of comprehension that will be addressed since IEP goals are based on the student’s present level of performance and are specific to the skills that will receive intervention. Does the student need to work on basic comprehension skills such as identifying who, what, where, when, and how, or sequencing/retell, or more advanced skills such as prediction and inference? Has there been a determination of what elements of comprehension may be missing – using context clues, understanding connective words and phrases, morphology, syntax and semantics?

You didn’t mention grade level, but I’ve included some examples of measurable comprehension goals based on common areas.

After reading various fiction and nonfiction statements, student will identify each with ___% accuracy.
After reading a nonfiction passage at instructional level, student will be able to identify the main idea and two supporting details from the text with ___% accuracy in 4/5 trials.
Given an instructional level text, student will be able to answer written comprehension questions with ___% accuracy in 4/5 trials.
After reading a short story, student will identify main character and setting with __% accuracy in 4/5 trials.
Given a short passage, student will use implied meaning to answer comprehension questions with ___% accuracy in 4/5 opportunities.

Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) measures that typically focus on reading for one minute are limited. The experts agree that the term oral reading fluency is better described as oral passage reading (Hasbrouck) or text reading fluency (Shanahan). Hasbrouck & Glaser (2019) have defined passage fluency as “reasonably accurate reading at an appropriate rate with suitable expression that leads to accurate and deep comprehension and motivation.”

With this definition in mind, there are a couple of questions to consider. How can we measure reasonably accurate reading and appropriate rate? The experts generally agree that fluency should be measured on text that a student can read independently with 95% accuracy and a Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) between the 50-75th percentile for the student’s grade level. For emerging readers, the recommendation is to provide controlled text that students can read with 97-98% accuracy. The most recent Hasbrouck & Tindal ORF Norms chart can be found at https://intensiveintervention.org/sites/default/files/2017%20ORF%20NORMS%20PDF.pdf.

As you mention, independent reading level is not universally defined. The first step in determining a student’s Present Level of Performance is to measure fluency and decide if fluency is an appropriate goal based on need. This is often done using an unpracticed, grade-level text. If a student’s accuracy is below 95% and WCPM is below the 75th percentile, then there will need to be a goal for decoding and a goal for fluency. The next measure is to identify the student’s fluency at their current reading level. When he or she is able to read text with 95% accuracy, often text at their current Lexile® level, is the WCPM percentile between the 50-75th percentile? This provides a baseline and a process for establishing an appropriate goal: where they are now (PLOP) and what the goal should be after receiving adequate intervention during the IEP period.

The experts agree that automaticity is the key to fluent reading and better comprehension. For students with dyslexia and weak decoding skills, fluency is frequently below the recommended percentile because they may read more slowly. Because fluency is so important to comprehension and motivation, goals for this area should always be considered. Dr. Hasbrouck has done a wonderful webinar on this topic that can be found on YouTube titled Reading Fluency: Essential for Reading Comprehension.

When given text or reading passages at their independent reading level, ____ will use knowledge of decoding skills and word recognition to increase their oral reading fluency with appropriate rate and expression to ___ words per minute with ___% accuracy.

If it’s their independent reading level, wouldn’t that imply that accuracy and rate would both already be high? Also, wouldn’t this be a moving target since the child’s independent reading level would shift over the course of a year? Finally, independent reading level is not universally defined and can be interpreted differently by different practitioners.