New Ways to Score in Fluency Tutor for Google

This week, we are redefining the way you can score passages with Fluency Tutor for Google, giving teachers even more flexibility and control of how they assess their students’ reading. 

Teachers can now score as much or as little of a student’s recording as they’d like, and can check out some new metrics to get an even better picture of how their students are doing. Read on to learn more and check out the video below.

When scoring a student’s reading fluency online in Fluency Tutor, teachers can now choose to score the entire recording, only the first minute, or anything in between. Whereas previously teachers could only score the first minute of a student’s recording, we have now introduced Start and End audio markers that can be used to select the amount of a recording you’d like to score, or easily score the entire recording. Here’s how it works:

Scoring an entire recording

As requested by many of our users, teachers can now score a student’s entire recording. When you first open a student’s passage, by default the Start and End audio markers will be at the beginning and end of the recording. So you can just click Play to start listening and marking errors. Once you reach the end of the passage, your Words Correct Per Minute and other metrics will be automatically calculated for you.

Scoring the first minute

For seasoned Fluency Tutor users, the concept of scoring only the first minute of a recording is probably a familiar one. This is how scoring previously worked in Fluency Tutor - you would start scoring from the beginning of the recording, and place a “Minute Marker” on the final word that a student reads after 60 seconds. This allows Words Correct Per Minute and the other metrics to be calculated.

Not to worry, this is still easy to do if you want to continue scoring this way. Just keep the Start marker at the beginning of the passage when the student starts reading, and move the End marker to one minute later. When the recording reaches that End marker, just click the last word the student has read and choose “Mark as Last Word”. Words Correct Per Minute and the other metrics will be automatically calculated.

Anything in between

Those are just a few recommendations of how to use the new scoring tools in Fluency Tutor, but the Start and End audio markers are completely adjustable so teachers can score almost any amount of a recording that they’d like. Words Correct Per Minute and other metrics will always be accurately calculated, even if you are scoring for longer than a minute. Just be sure to score for at least a minute - if you select a snippet of the recording that’s less than one minute, the Words Correct Per Minute will not be calculated.

New metrics now available

In addition to the improvements to scoring, we are now also introducing a few brand new metrics to the Score a Passage page. 

• Words Per Minute: This tells you the number of words the student reads per minute, including any words where they may make an error
• Error Rate: This displays as a ratio of the number of errors made, compared to the total number of words read
• Self-Correction: You can now mark a self-correction for any word that a student self-corrects. These will not count against the student in their Words Correct Per Minute or other metrics.
• Self-Correction Rate: This will be calculated as a ratio of the number of self-corrections made, compared to the total number of errors made (including self-corrections)

We designed these scoring improvements to help teachers make even better use of Fluency Tutor for Google to track their students’ reading progress, so we hope that they do just that! Let us know your feedback in the comments section below.