I believe that there is a direct relationship between fluency and comprehension. There should be an appropriate balance between fluency (their rate of reading)and the comprehension of what the students are reading about. A lot of the times in my classroom, students will become embarrassed if they ready slowly or choppy out loud to the rest of the class and generally, students will only volunteer to read out loud if they have a quicker reading speed or feel confident enough with their reading abilities. While they're independently reading, they think the fastest reader is "cooler", however, if you assess the student who speeds through their book, they have very little recollection of what they had just read. The pressures that the students place on each other to be a good reader/"cool" reader is increasing the loss of comprehension that the students could be acquiring.
A good way to promote reading and comprehension that I am incorporating in my classroom is Read Aloud. I think its important for students to enjoy and be interested in what a book can teach them. Even if it's a realistic fiction story, new experiences and ideas can be learned through reading and when the students are able to be read to, I think it's an easy way for the students to learn to love reading.
One way that my CT and I have been assessing my students' fluency and comprehension is through the DRA. There were specific sections of the scoring sheet for the DRA that assesses their fluency/reading rate and there are comprehension questions that the student must fill out about the selection that they read. These answers help to show us if they have acquired any information from what they read. I really found the DRA scores to be useful in understanding where my students are in regards to fluency and comprehension.
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