This write-up of the study shows that educators should re-evaluate the rate at which they expect most students to be able to read; this has implications for:
1) labeling students in need of intervention
2) expectations for in-class readings
3) how much reading as homework is assigned.
The average page of a novel contains 250-300 words. I tell students that the average fluent reader can read a page a minute, citing a commonly referenced statistic of 300 words per minute. So, when I assign a 35-page section, I tell students that I am assigning approximately 35 minutes of reading.
(From the new study: The number of 300 wpm was mentioned by Keith Rayner (1978) in his first review paper on eye movements in reading. “It was repeated in the highly cited review paper of Rayner (1998) and two much used textbooks Rayner co-authored (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, & Clifton, 2012). Finally, it figured in the Rayner et al. (2016) paper on speed reading.”)
However, this new comprehensive review of 190 studies finds that the average reading rate for fiction turns out to be 260 wpm; for nonfiction, it’s just 238 wpm.
So, it is possible that one of our more densely printed novels indeed has 300 words per page. For a 35-page reading assignment, that is 10,500 words. And if one of my students is slightly below the average reading rate, say, reading at 250 words per minute, it will take them at least 42 minutes to read, rather than 35 minutes.
Recommendation: Educators should acknowledge and plan reading assignments based on this new number. They should also tell their students that the average fluent reader can read 3/4 of a page per minute, and that they can expect a 35-page fiction reading assignment to take about 41 minutes.
Ms. Crandell 