Oral reading fluency as a measure of reading comprehension is based on the data. When you look at correlations between various quick probes of reading skill and in-depth measures of reading comprehension, oral reading fluency actually has the best correlation. This is why it's used as a proxy for reading comprehension skill in elementary-age classroom progress monitoring probes.
Although it doesn't have as much face validity as some other measures, such as the cloze (fill-in-the-blank) reading tasks, or as much clinical richness as a direct measure like the WIAT-III reading comprehension subtest, or the TORC-4 (which is a multi-subtest measure solely of aspects of reading comprehension), it's quick, easy, cheap, objective, and surprisingly accurate. So good for screening, repeated measures, and collecting group data.
Of course, it's still a proxy, not a direct measure, and subject to all the caveats of a proxy.
Last edited by aeh; 10/16/15 10:15 AM.
