Re: Jay Samuels on DIBELS

[aburke5054@aol.com]

 It's not clear to me what the big deal is about predicting reading comprehension at first grade or even at second grade.  A lot of kids are just getting going in   reading at those grades.  If teachers use DIBELS to get them going better, that's great.  

Art


 

-----Original Message-----
From: PRISCILLA GUTIERREZ <pgutpgut@msn.com>
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 10:04 am
Subject: [arn-l] Jay Samuels on DIBELS
Maybe the problems were 










From: Reading Research Quarterly

The DIBELS Tests: Is Speed of Barking at Print What We Mean by Reading Fluency?

S. Jay Samuels, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

As one of the reviewers of Brant Riedel's study of DIBELS, I reflected on his 
revisions and findings. I concluded that his study was important for the 
following reasons. He investigated the extent to which five DIBELS instruments 
predict poor versus satisfactory comprehension; his literature review 
incorporated a comprehensive overview of research that attempted to validate 
DIBELS as a test, and he pulled together reports that are critical of DIBELS.

In Riedel's study, students were administered the following tests: Letter Naming 
Fluency, Nonsense Word Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, Oral Reading 
Fluency, and Retell Fluency. These tests were used to determine if they could 
predict students' first and second-grade reading comprehension status. He 
concluded that:

“If the goal of DIBELS administration is to identify students at risk for 
reading comprehension difficulties, the present results suggest that by the 
middle of first grade, administration of DIBELS subtests other than ORF is not 
necessary. The minimal gains do not justify the time and effort.”

Other than the test of Oral Reading Fluency, Riedel's findings lead one to 
question whether the widespread use of the other DIBELS tests is justified.

The DIBELS's battery of tests, which are used to assess more than 1,800,000 
students from kindergarten to grade 6, aim to identify students who may be at 
risk of reading failure, to monitor their progress, and to guide instruction. 
With the widespread use of DIBELS tests, a number of scholars in the field of 
reading have evaluated them, and not all of their evaluations have been 
flattering. For example, Pearson (2006, p. v) stated,

“I have built a reputation for taking positions characterized as situated in 
'the radical middle'. Not so on DIBELS. I have decided to join that group 
convinced that DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading 
since the development of flash cards.”

Goodman (2006), who was one of the key developers of whole language, is 
concerned that despite warnings to the contrary, the tests have become a de 
facto curriculum in which the emphasis on speed convinces students that the goal 
in reading is to be able to read fast and that understanding is of secondary 
importance. Pressley, Hilden, and Shankland (2005, p. 2) studied the Oral 
Reading Fluency and Retelling Fluency measures that are part of DIBELS. They 
concluded that “DIBELS mispredicts reading performance much of the time, and at 
best is a measure of who reads quickly without regard to whether the reader 
comprehends what is read.”

If Riedel's conclusion that administration of subtests other than Oral Reading 
Fluency is not necessary for prediction of end-of-first- and second-grade 
comprehension, in combination with the critical evaluations of DIBELS by some of 
our leading scholars in reading is not enough to raise the red flag of caution 
about the widespread use of DIBELS instruments, I have an additional concern 
about the misuse of the term fluency that is attached to each of the tests. 
Because each of the tests is labeled as a fluency test, it is only fair game to 
see if that term is justified. I contend that with the exception of the Retell 
Fluency test, none of the DIBELS instruments are tests of fluency, only speed, 
and that the Retell Fluency test is so hampered by the unreliability of 
accurately counting the stream of words the student utters as to make that test 
worthless. Let us not forget that, in the absence of reliability, no test is 
valid. To understand the essential characteristic of fluency, and what its 
window dressings are, we must look to automaticity theory for guidance (LaBerge 
& Samuels, 1974). At the risk of over-simplification, in order to comprehend a 
text, one must identify the words on the page and one must construct their 
meaning. If all of a reader's cognitive resources are focused on and consumed by 
word recognition, as happens with beginning reading, then comprehension cannot 
occur at the same time. However, once beginning readers have identified the 
words in the text, they then switch their cognitive resources to constructing 
meaning. Note that a beginning reader's strategy is sequential, first word 
recognition and then comprehension.

How can we describe the reading process for students who have become automatic 
at word recognition as the result of one or more years of instruction and 
practice? For them, the reading process is different. When the decoding task is 
automatic, the student can do both the decoding and the comprehension tasks at 
the same time. The fluency section in the National Reading Panel report 
(National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000, p. 3-8) stated 
precisely the same idea: “The fluent reader is one who can perform multiple 
tasks-such as word recognition and comprehension-at the same time.”

It is the simultaneity of decoding and comprehension that is the essential 
characteristic of reading fluency. Secondary characteristics of fluency such as 
speed, accuracy, and expression are indicators, but not the essential 
characteristics. For example, I can read Spanish orally with accuracy and speed, 
but I am unable to understand what I have read. Am I fluent in Spanish? No! Nor 
does the ability to read nonsense jabberwocky with expression capture the 
essential characteristic of fluency. Thus, one criticism I have of the DIBELS 
tests is that, despite their labels, they are not valid tests of the construct 
of fluency as it is widely understood and defined. They assess only accuracy and 
speed. The creators of DIBELS are guilty of reification. By attaching the term 
fluency to their tests, they create the false assumption that that is what their 
tests measure. I have another criticism. As Riedel reports in his research, 
about 15% of the students who take the Oral Reading Fluency test get 
misidentified as good readers, when, in fact, they have poor comprehension. 
These misidentified students are often English-language learners who have 
vocabulary problems that interfere with comprehension.

Almost all the validation studies for DIBELS have used a procedure that mimics 
what beginning readers do when they read a text, but not what fluent readers do. 
As I described (1994, p. 821) in my updated version of the LaBerge and Samuels 
(1974) model of reading, beginning readers first decode the words in the text. 
Having decoded the words, the reader then switches attention over to getting 
meaning, a two-step process. In validating the DIBELS tests, the researcher is 
likely to get a reading speed score on the DIBELS test, and at a different time, 
on a different test, such as comprehension, the researcher gets a score for the 
student on the second test. Then the scores are correlated, and under these 
conditions the two scores may correlate quite well. However, this two-step 
sequence is what beginning readers do when they read, not what skilled readers 
do.

What we need, instead, are tests that mimic fluent reading, that demand 
simultaneous decoding and comprehension. In order to do that, the researcher 
must inform students that as soon as the oral reading is done, the student will 
be asked comprehension questions. Under these conditions, the student must 
decode and comprehend at the same time. When such testing conditions are used, 
at least one researcher (Cramer, in press) has failed to find a significant 
correlation between oral reading speed and comprehension. Failure to find that 
reading speed and comprehension correlate significantly makes sense when the 
reading task demands simultaneous decoding and comprehension. If one reads too 
fast, comprehension is compromised; thus, slowing down can improve 
comprehension. Graduate students studying for exams know that reading speed can 
be the enemy of comprehension.

Let me summarize my position. The most legitimate use of oral reading speed is 
as Deno (1985) brilliantly conceptualized it: a way to monitor student progress. 
However, the danger of using reading speed as the measure of progress is that 
some students and teachers focus on speed at the expense of understanding. One 
should note that the misuse of the term fluency is not found in Deno's original 
groundbreaking work on curriculum-based measurement. The developers of DIBELS 
would do the reading field a service by dropping the term fluency from their 
tests. That said, there is need to develop new tests that that can measure 
fluency developmentally across grades. To do this, the testing demands would 
require that students simultaneously decode and comprehend using texts that 
increase in difficulty. Because the reading field already has a theory for 
conceptualizing fluency, and the expertise for developing standardized tests, it 
is time to move forward in developing theoretically and pedagogically sound 
measures of fluency.

S. JAY SAMUELS is a professor of education psychology and of curriculum and 
instruction at the University of Minnesota (College of Education and Human 
Development, Department of Educational Psychology, Burton Hall, Minneapolis, MN 
55455, USA; e-mail samue001@umn.edu). He served on the National Reading Panel 
and coauthored the fluency section of the panel's report. He is the recipient of 
the International Reading Association's William S. Gray Citation of Merit and 
the National Reading Conference's Oscar S. Causey Award, and is a member of the 
Reading Hall of Fame.

References

Cramer, K. (in press). Effect of degree of challenge on reading performance. 
Reading and Writing Quarterly.

Deno, S. (1985). Curriculum based measurement: The emerging alternative. 
Exceptional Children, 52, 219-232.

Goodman, K.S. (2006). A critical review of DIBELS. In K.S. Goodman (Ed.), The 
truth about DIBELS: What it is, what it does (pp. 1-39). Portsmouth, NH: 
Heinemann.

LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S.J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information 
processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 293-323.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the 
National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment 
of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for 
reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. 
Government Printing Office.

Pearson, P.D. (2006). Foreword. In K.S. Goodman (Ed.), The truth about DIBELS: 
What it is, what it does (pp. v-xix). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Pressley, M., Hilden, K., & Shankland, R. (2005). An evaluation of end-grade-3 
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS): Speed reading 
without comprehension, predicting little (Tech. Rep.). East Lansing, MI: 
Michigan State University, Literacy Achievement Research Center.

Samuels, S.J. (1994). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in 
reading, revisited. In R. Ruddell, M.R. Ruddell, & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical 
models and processes of reading (4th ed., pp. 816-837). Newark, DE: 
International Reading Association.




Priscilla Gutierrez
Outreach Specialist
New Mexico School for the Deaf

...change is inevitable, growth is optional...
-------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe ARN-L:
Phttp://interversity.org/lists/arn-l/subscribe.html



 


________________________________________________________________________
Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! - http://mail.aol.com