Evidence for automated scoring and shorter passages of CBM-R in early elementary school

Curriculum-based measurement of oral reading fluency (CBM-R) is widely used across the United States as a strong indicator of comprehension and overall reading achievement, but has several limitations including errors in administration and large standard errors of measurement. The purpose of this study is to compare scoring methods and passage lengths of CBM-R in an effort to evaluate potential improvements upon traditional CBM-R limitations. For a sample of 902 students in Grades 2 through 4, who collectively read 13,766 passages, we used mixed-effect models to estimate differences in CBM-R scores and examine the effects of (a) scoring method (comparing a human scoring criterion vs. traditional human or automatic speech recognition [ASR] scoring), and (b) passage length (25, 50, or 85 words, and traditional CBM-R length). We also examined differences in word score (correct/incorrect) agreement rates between human-to-human scoring and human-to-ASR scoring. Our results indicated that ASR can be applied in schools to score CBM-R, and that scores for shorter passages are comparable to traditional passages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).