Oral Reading Accuracy: Findings and Implications From Recent Research

The three accuracy ranges for oral reading—easy, instructional level, and hard—are familiar to almost everyone who teaches young students just learning to read. It may come as a surprise to learn, then, that no study has yet been conducted with beginning readers to support our well‐accepted views about accuracy ranges and their role in reading development. What accuracy range is optimal? Does it really matter if a student reads with less than 90% accuracy? In this article, the authors share what they learned when they explored these questions about oral reading accuracy and student progress.