An Examination of the Relation of Nonsense Word Fluency Initial Status and Gains to Reading Outcomes for Beginning Readers

School psychologists increasingly assist school personnel with linking assessment information to instructional decisions (Baker et al., 2008; Batsche et al., 2005; Gersten & Dimino, 2006). A system of early identification of and interventions for academic problems is central to an assessment-instruction feedback loop (Kame'enui, Simmons, & Coyne, 2000; Raudenbush, 2008; Torgesen et al., 2001), and early identification for reading depends on measures grounded in a strong theoretical model of early reading development. The purpose of this study was to investigate the utility of a pseudoword fluency measure used in the early grades to assess students' acquisition of beginning decoding skills, a key ingredient in reading proficiency that has strong theoretical and empirical support (Fien et al., 2008; Good, Baker, & Peyton, 2009). Importance of the Alphabetic Principle In alphabetic writing systems, a foundational skill causally associated with reading proficiency is the alphabetic principle. This skill enables students to link the internal structure of words (letters and letter strings) to their sounds (Adams, 1990; Dehaene, 2009; National Reading Panel, 2000; National Research Council, 1998). The alphabetic principle is comprised of two component skills: (a) alphabetic understanding, which refers to a student's knowledge of letter-sound correspondences, and (b) phonological recoding, which refers to a student's ability to blend sounds to read words (Adams, 1990; Ehri, 1991). Extensive research supports teaching and assessing the alphabetic principle. For example, the National Reading Panel (2000) reached an unequivocal conclusion that systematic phonics instruction should play a major role in teaching children to read. In 38 phonics intervention studies, the mean effect size associated with direct phonics instruction was .44, demonstrating "solid support for the conclusion that systematic phonics instruction makes a bigger contribution to children's growth in reading than alternative programs providing unsystematic or no phonics instruction" (chapter 2, p. 92). The report defines systematic phonics instruction as "explicitly teaching students a prescribed set of letter-sound relations and having students read text that provides practice using these relations to decode words" (chapter 2, p. 92). The rationale for teaching and assessing the alphabetic principle also has strong theoretical support. Perfetti's (1985) verbal efficiency theory asserts the importance of the alphabetic principle as a foundational skill of reading proficiency. Three key assumptions underscore this theory: (a) word identification is linked to internal phonological representations of words (i.e., the sound structure of language); (b) the amount of time it takes a reader to identify an isolated word is an index of processing speed and how well the student knows the word; and (c) a student's decoding skill is the major source of variation in the amount of time it takes students to read an isolated word (Perfetti, 1985). Thus, reading development is influenced by several factors associated with increasingly adaptive and proficient use of the alphabetic principle and the awareness of the association between orthographic patterns of words and their pronunciations (Rack, Hulme, Snowling, & Wright man, 1994). Theoretical accounts of the relationship between the constituent processes of the alphabetic principle and more complex reading behavior (e.g., reading comprehension, or RC) have also invoked the role of automaticity (Adams, 1990; LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; National Research Council, 1998; National Reading Panel, 2000). Automaticity is an important and prominent concept in everyday life, beginning with the obvious recognition that we perform some routine activities quickly and effortlessly and with little conscious awareness and thought--that is, we do them automatically. However, other tasks, particularly new and unfamiliar tasks, require deliberate attention and processing (Logan, 1988). …