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End of Term Snapshot: Reading Fluency, Accuracy, and What’s Driving Growth

Written by Heather Down 12 September 2025

Each term, I like to take a look at what is going on in my private tutoring practice. This helps me see where I need to make adjustments with teaching. I’m not just looking at increases in words per minute (WPM) and accuracy, but in the how and why of what we’ve done. I fed my data into Chat GPT and was able to draw out a summary of progress, which links to my instructional choices, and how this all ties back to evidence-based models like Scarborough’s Reading Rope and the Writing Rope. This is what I have summarised.

Fluency and Accuracy Norms: At a Glance

Here’s where many of my students ended this term relative to norms, and what their growth has looked like:

CategoryWhat we typically see in norms (WPM & Accuracy)My Students’ Outcomes
Expected FluencyFor most primary/intermediate levels, norms lie in a range that increases with year level (e.g., early grades ~50-80 WPM rising to ~100-130+ by upper primary) with high accuracy (97-100%) for fluent reading.Many students have moved into or above their expected ranges. Some remain just below, but with strong upward trajectories. 
AccuracyFluent reading is typically expected to be at or very close to 99% (or ≥ 97%) for most instructional tasks. Errors slow comprehension, so accuracy stabilises first, then fluency builds.Nearly all students now read with 97-100% accuracy. Several have made large jumps in accuracy. 

So what does this tell me? Overall, there have been strong gains in both fluency & accuracy. Students who started well below norms have made marked progress; those already closer to norms have consolidated and pushed ahead.

What We’ve Been Doing: Practices Behind the Gains

I’ve shared a fair bit about the instructional approaches that have underpinned this progress, and where I was unsure whether this would work, I can now see that it is making a difference. I really felt like I was taking a risk trying to build a knowledge-based curriculum into a private tutoring practice. I always used to tell parents I was NOT teaching curriculum, that it was my job to teach the foundational literacy skills that are/were missing. Now I realise that I cannot just rely on this, I have to go deeper and activate all strands of the reading and writing ropes to truly say I am an intervention tutor. 

  1. Knowledge-Based Units (4-6 weeks)
     Each unit (for example, The Portal at School narrative, New Zealand Inventors) runs for multiple weeks. This allows students to deepen content, vocabulary, and structures, rather than surface-level exposure. Students build familiarity with topic language, morphology, and concepts, which then supports both comprehension and writing.
  2. Text at the Centre of All Writing Tasks
     Writing tasks are always tied back to texts students have read during their sessions. Each text is between 3 and 5 minutes long, and texts are created to model the writing task. We utilise the texts as models for genre, structure, language, and vocabulary. This helps students see high-quality writing in action, internalise expectations, and apply them in their own writing.
  3. Phoneme/Grapheme Correspondence & Morphology Focus
     Early on, especially for students who need reinforcement, I emphasise explicit phonics (letter-sound correspondence), decoding, and spelling patterns. When students are ready, I integrate morphology (roots, prefixes, suffixes). I initially teach these systematically, then move to target base-words within texts. This helps students not just decode, but also understand how words are built, meaningfully enhancing vocabulary and fluency.
  4. Tailoring Text Difficulty Individually or in Small Pairs / Groups
     Texts are not “one size fits all.” Whilst I do follow the same topic each week, texts are created that are suitably challenging but achievable, with scaffolding as needed. Sometimes students read with their partner, so the match of text difficulty, support, and interest has to be just right. This ensures that growth in fluency doesn’t come at the cost of comprehension or motivation. (Or the expertise of a more fluent reader)

Evidence and Theory: Tim Shanahan and the Ropes

I’m a fan of Tim Shanahan, and he has written a lot recently about how instructional level texts (i.e. always giving students texts that they can almost read unaided) may not be optimal once foundational decoding and basic fluency are secure. From his blog:

“Teaching text with *more challenging texts than you have dared to use in the past leads to higher reading levels.” shanahanonliteracy.com
 And: “Grade-level texts or higher are the best choice for most students … Those are often the texts that students can’t already read well. The purpose of a reading lesson then is to guide students to make sense of a text that they cannot succeed with on their own and to develop the abilities to deal with such texts.” Edutopia

These ideas align with what we’re doing: not keeping every student in only “safe” texts, but pushing them in a supported way.

Linking it into Scarborough’s Reading Rope & Sedita’s Writing Rope

For learners with language-based difficulties, these evidence-based principles are especially effective: high accuracy in decoding, scaffolding, strong vocabulary and morphology instruction, repeated exposure via texts, plus deliberate practice. These are exactly what research (and Shanahan, among many others) points to as crucial.

What This Means and Where We’re Going

Why This Matters: For Students and Families