Does DIBELS Put Reading First?

Abstract

Schools across the nation are responding to reading assessment mandates by turning to DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), a program endorsed by the Federal Reading First Grant Office, to assess fluency on a range of reading-related tasks. DIBELS makes strong claims regarding its usefulness in documenting reading progress and predicting success on standardized tests and is frequently used to group and level students for intervention and instruction. This article addresses the effectiveness of using DIBELS to assess second-grade readers and presents an analysis of the relationship between DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF) and authentic reading. Our data show no connection between DORF and students' oral reading fluency and comprehension of authentic literature and questions the usefulness of DIBELS.

Keywords:

• comprehension
• DIBELS
• fluency
• miscue analysis
• reading assessment
• reading first
• reading rate

Notes

¹We thank Prisca Martens, Poonum Ayra, G. Pat Wilson, and Lijun Jin for their participation in collecting and analyzing the miscue data for this project.