What is an evidence-based practice? How do I know if evidence shows that a practice will be right for my students? Many practitioners ask these critical questions every day as they are faced with making decisions regarding how to best meet the needs of their students.
Norms for oral reading fluency (ORF) can be used to help educators make decisions about which students might need intervention in reading and to help monitor students’ progress once instruction has begun. This paper describes the origins of the widely used curriculum-based measure of ORF and how the creation and use of ORF norms has evolved over time. Using data from three widely-used commercially available ORF assessments (DIBELS, DIBELS Next, and easyCBM), a new set of compiled ORF norms for grade 1-6 are presented here along with an analysis of how they differ from the norms created in 2006.