(NOT the Official) DIBELS Clearinghouse

The website Borderland has this provocative entry, with comments, on DIBELS.

It’s snake oil time. I started to write this last month when I heard they’d be coming around again, but I couldn’t find the link to the DIBELS homepage. Thanks to Doug Johnson for pointing the way. Things are more interesting today. This morning I read Doug’s call for more testing.

Doug also recently posted a link to a post written by Ken Goodman on a mailing list at Stephen Krashen’s site, which I’m now subscribed to. Professor Goodman wrote sarcastically about the power of the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills). He said that DIBELS is the perfect test in the same sense that Katrina might have been the perfect storm. Since both of these links (to Goodman/Krashen and the call for more testing) point to opposite points on the testing compass, I should probably quit here and let them cancel each other out. But I wanted to say something about DIBELS.

I liked Ken Goodman’s statement for its ironic edge.

It’s basic premise is that it can reduce reading development to a series of tasks, each measurable in one minute. Each test has arbitrary benchmarks which get more difficult to achieve in successive grades. The test authors claim that the sub-tests are “stepping stones