User Name. Thread Tools. Joined: Feb Posts: 62 Junior Member. Find More Posts by msaaa. Joined: Sep Posts: Full Member. Find More Posts by spedkidsrock. Joined: Nov Posts: 98 Full Member. Find More Posts by vocabfreak. While that is very close on dibels, that's more than 20 wpm what she should be for aims. I don't want her exited out of outside interventions if she's really that behind.
Mar 31, What was her last aims benchmark? She would have just taken it a few months ago. Mar 31, I would suggest continuing intervention until at least you benchmark again. Then you would have the data to compare. This is unless the classroom teacher thinks they don't need intervention anymore. Joined: Jan 12, Messages: 3, Likes Received: Apr 2, I would definitely recommend against trying to interchange different assessment tools.
Part of the answer is in the norms that were created, and probably part of the answer is some small variability in passage difficulty based on the formulas used to level passages in each system.
Also, ideally districts would create local norms, and set their own cuts points based on the amount of intervention resources available.
EdEd , Apr 2, Joined: Sep 13, Messages: 2 Likes Received: 0. MsTurner , Sep 13, Sep 13, You must remember Benchmark in Dibels is the bottom of the grade level. Keep that in mind when you look at your results. Sep 13, Haha, I wrote this thread two school districts ago!
Early literacy assessment must inform the school on how well a program is meeting the goals of optimizing student literacy learning. Informing Instruction. The chief purpose of assessment is to inform instruction. Teachers use assessment to give themselves actionable information that will help them design instruction for learners. As literacy researcher P. DIBELS becomes the driver of the curriculum and the curriculum is narrowed in unproductive ways as a result.
To quote Pearson directly: I have decided to join that group of scholars and teachers and parents who are convinced that DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards. In contrast, taking a Running Record of a child's oral reading provides the teacher with real, actionable information. By listening to a child's reading and taking notes on that reading, teachers get a window into what a reader knows and is able to do in reading.
When the reader makes an error or in Kenneth Goodman's terminology a miscue , the teacher gets invaluable information for future teaching points. Following a Running Record, teachers can assess comprehension by asking the child to retell what was read. For instance, they might evaluate how many letters the children can name, or how well they can hear the sounds within words. Sometimes, as in your school, they ask kids to read graded passages or little books and to answer questions about them, or as in your previous school, they might gauge student ability to perceive correctly the sounds within words.
The basic idea of these testing schemes is to find lacks and limitations. And so on. Instructional validity refers to the appropriateness of the impact these tests have upon instruction. These tests shine a light on parts of the reading process—and teachers and principals tend to focus their attention on these tested parts—neglecting anything about literacy development that may not have this kind of flashlight.
Thus, one sees first-grade teachers spending inordinate amounts of time on word attack trying to raise NWF nonsense word fluency scores, but with little teaching of untested skills like vocabulary or comprehension or writing.
Even worse, we sometimes find instruction aimed at mastery of the nonsense words themselves too with the idea that this will result in higher scores. Of course, this is foolishness. The idea of these formative testing regimes is to figure out how the children are doing with some skill that supports their reading progress, not to see who can obtain the best formative test scores.
The reason why DIBELS evaluates how well kids can read decode or sound out nonsense words is that research is clear that decoding ability is essential to learning to read and instruction that leads students to decode better eventually improves reading ability itself including reading comprehension. Nonsense words can provide a good avenue for the assessment of this skill because they would not favor any particular curriculum as real words would , they correlate with reading as well as real words do, and no one in their right mind would have children memorizing nonsense words.
Oops… apparently, the last consideration is not correct. Teachers, not understanding or caring the purpose of the test, are sometimes willing to raise scores artificially by just this kind of memorization. And, to what end? Remember, the tests are aimed at identifying learning needs that can be addressed with extra teaching. Another example of this kind of educational shortsightedness has to do with the idea of using the tests to determine who gets extra help, like from a Title I reading teacher, perhaps.
In most schools, the idea is to catch kids literacy learning gaps early so we can keep them on the right track from the beginning. But what if you are in a school with high mobility your kids move a lot? I know of principals who deploy these resources later—grades 2 or 3—to try to make certain that these bucks improve reading achievement at their schools.
Instead of targeting the testing and intervention at the points where these will help kids the most, these principals aim them at what might make the principals themselves look better kind of like the teachers teaching kids the nonsense words. Back to your question… your school is only going to test an amalgam of fluency oral reading of the graded passages and reading comprehension.
If all that you want to know is how well your students can read, that is probably adequate. If all the first-grade teachers tested her charges with that kind of test, the principal will end up with a pretty good idea of how well the first-graders in his school are reading so far.
Your principal is doing nothing wrong in imposing that kind of test if that is what he wants to know. I assume those results will be used to identify which kids will need extra teaching. I get your discomfort with this, however. You are a teacher.
You are wondering… if little Mary needs extra teaching what should that extra teaching focus on? The default response for too many teachers, with this test or any other, is to teach something that looks like the test. In first grade that would mean neglecting those very skills that improve reading ability.
The official panels that have carefully examined the research and concluded that decoding instruction was essential did so because such teaching resulted in better overall reading achievement not just improvements in the skill that was taught. The same can be said about PA, fluency, and vocabulary instruction. That sounds pretty sensible since it would keep teachers from just focusing on the underlying skills and then ignoring reading comprehension , and yet, I quake at those teachers who will now teach reading with the test passages or who will coach the kids on the answering the test questions so that no one needs to be tested further--in other words, hiding the fact that their kids are struggling.
Teach it all, monitor it all Let me come to this teacher's defense--possibly. Because the first few levels use predictable text rather than decodable text. What they assess is whether students have mastered around 30 high-frequency words and then are able to look at the picture and read words like "elephant" or "swing", words most kindergarteners could not independently decode.
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