*6.3. CORFS*

The Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale was developed in 2013 by researchers who had used automated means of assessing prosody [24]. They sought to create a spectrographically-grounded rating scale. As a result, the two features of prosody measured with this rubric were intonation (pitch) and pausing (see Table 3). There are four possible rating levels for both dimensions.


**Table 3.** Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale (CORFS).

Benjamin et al. thought that this instrument would be an advance over MDFS and NAEP because of its grounding in the more objective spectrographic research literature on reading prosody [24]. CORFS assesses the three components of fluency (i.e., rate, accuracy, and prosody) simultaneously by incorporating measures of all three components, capitalizing on the published grade-level reading rate norms by Hasbrouck and Tindal [49]. Benjamin et al. emphasize the understanding that fluency serves as a support for comprehension and that reading prosody is a critical component in this process [24].

In the development of CORFS, developers carried out two studies to evaluate its validity. In the first, three raters judged the expressive reading of 59 second graders. High degrees of correlation were found between these expression ratings and standardized assessments of reading comprehension and spectrographic measures of fluency. In the second study, 60 third graders read two texts and were evaluated using spectrographic measures. Then two raters independently evaluated the recordings using CORFS. Comparisons between the two prosody measures showed comparable results.

To our knowledge, this instrument has not been used by researchers outside those who developed it or who are involved in spectrographic research, although it has been cited by other researchers [50,51]. On other occasions the developers have suggested CORFS as a resource for other researchers [52,53].

In summary, the CORFS measure shows high correlations with spectrographic scores and traditional reading assessment scores. The mean CORFS score for total expression was 5.78 out of 8 and the interrater reliability coe fficient was 0.99. Because it has not been used widely, it is not ye<sup>t</sup> possible to discuss findings from studies using this instrument.
