"Fluency changes as the nature of the task changes."

The Concept of Fluency as an Educational Skills Performance Measure (Page 2)

Using Fluency as an Academic Measure
Fluency could be used as a means to chart progress on a number of key academic tasks as opposed to grades or anecdotal reports. The first step would be to determine fluent levels of performances commonly expected of students.

Some of that work has been done over the past thirty years by a group of behavioural educators known as precision teachers. This group evolved as practitioners of the work of Dr. Ogden R. Lindsley and his research at Harvard and University of Kansas and that of his graduate student, Dr. Eric C. Haughton, who first used the concept of fluency as a competency measurement of academic skills. Precision teaching practitioners generally express fluencies as count over time measures with a specified range of corrects and errors. Oral reading fluency, one of the most critical and most common measures of student performance, is stated as "seeing and saying 200-250 words per minute with 2 or fewer errors".

Some Well Used Examples
Over the years with tens of thousands of students and millions of timed tasks, some basic notions of what fluency might look like on a number of simple tasks has evolved from the efforts of this group. The concept of fluency has been operationally defined as a particular behavior and given a range of frequencies into which that behavior should fall to meet the standard of being fluent.
Here are some of the things we have learned:
1. Humans speak conversationally and correctly at about 200 words per minute.
2. Humans read aloud accurately at between 200 and 250 words per minute.
3. Once cursive writing skills are learned, humans write familiar words at twenty to thirty words per minute.
4. Humans do simple arithmetic calculations correctly at eighty to one hundred calculations per minute
5. Humans write stories or thoughts at 20-30 words per minute.
6. Humans read silently for pleasure at 400-500 words per minute with recall.
7. Humans read words in lists at 100 words per minute correctly.
8. Competent humans write dictated words at 20 to 30 words per minute
9. Humans write 150-160 numeric or alphabet characters per minute legibly.
10. Humans tell details or facts from a passage at 30-40 facts per minute.

These measures can be applied to a large variety of the daily tasks that we ask students to do. Determining their current level of expertise on specific tasks becomes as simple as measuring the performance for some specified period of time, counting the corrects and errors and comparing that performance to the known standard.

Changing the Task Changes the Fluency
Another interesting aspect of fluency is that it changes as the nature of the task changes. Students use different input and output channels to do different tasks. They may listen to a lesson, or read it. They may answer questions in a written or oral format. Fluency ranges then become specific to the way in which the information is being input and output. These different ways of doing a task become defined as learning channels. Each task has an input channel and an output channel, each with its particular frequency range for fluency. For example, students see and say words in a list at 80-100 words per minute, but they hear and write the same words fluently at 20-30 words per minute. Different task, different fluency.

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