Using Text Reading Fluency to Identify Students at Risk for Reading Comprehension Difficulties Across Grades 4, 7, and 9

Text reading fluency (TRF) is widely used to identify students at risk for reading difficulties, yet evidence for its screening utility beyond the elementary grades remains limited. This study examined the accuracy of TRF for identifying students with reading comprehension difficulties at ages 9, 12, and 14. Three cutoff-selection approaches were compared: optimization-based methods, fixed sensitivity thresholds (SE ≥ .90), and norm-referenced percentiles. Receiver operating characteristic analyses evaluated the classification performance of each approach. Results showed that TRF significantly predicted reading comprehension difficulties across grades, but classification performance depended strongly on cutoff selection. These findings suggest that inconsistencies in prior research may partly reflect differences in cutoff-selection methods rather than differences in predictive validity. When high sensitivity is required, TRF should be used within a multistage screening framework with follow-up assessments. When used as a stand-alone screening measure, optimization-based cutoffs provide the most defensible thresholds.