(NOT the Official) DIBELS Clearinghouse

Here you will find the beginning of the paper. For the full paper in pdf file, go to
http://www.mireadingfirst.org/resources/research/downloads/tr1.pdf .

Evaluation of Reading First in Michigan
Technical Report #1

Joanne F. Carlisle
Stephen G. Schilling
Sarah E. Scott
Ji Zeng
University of Michigan

Using Classroom Reading Measures to Estimate Progress

DIBELS is touted as "research-based" and firmly grounded in the "Big Ideas" in literacy - according to the National Reading Panel (NRP). Blind faith in the NRP as the foundation for what constitutes "research-based" is about as smart as building a house of cards on a bed of sand.
C'mon folks - the NRP was commissioned by Congress - shouldn't that have been the first red flag?
Seriously though, the members of the NRP were expected to do too much with too little - the proof is in the pudding - the Report. Ahhh - but which report - the 32 page summary, or the 500 page report of the subgroups? Wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

April 2006
The Vermont Society for the Study of Education has published the nation's first critical look at DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) titled, Examining DIBELS: What it is and What it Does.

The book's main contributor and editor is the nationally and internationally renowned reading authority Ken Goodman, Professor Emeritus from the Department of Language, Reading and Culture at the University of Arizona. Goodman is past president of the International Reading Association and the National Conference on Language and Literacy. Expertly evoking the DIBELS landscape, Goodman sees it as "a set of silly tests" that "misrepresent pupils" and "demean teachers." However, his ultimate depiction of DIBELS is as the "pedagogy of the absurd."

http://www.msularc.org/dibels%20submitted.pdf

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS): Speed Reading Without Comprehension, Predicting Little

by Michael Pressley, Katherine Hilden, Rebecca Shankland
Michigan State University

This research was supported by a grant from the Michigan State University Research Excellence Fund to the Literacy Achievement Research Center (LARC). The authors are grateful for the outstanding cooperation of the Administration and Faculty of the South Redford MI School District, especially Cherie Cornick, Michelle Chase, Amy Davidson, and Carol Lindman.

By Andrew Brownstein and Travis Hicks

By January of 2003, Kentucky reading officials were frustrated. They had just been denied federal Reading First funds for the third time, and state leaders worried that they might lose the opportunity to bring in an unprecedented $90 million for reading instruction in grades K-3 over six years. Like most states strapped by budget cuts, they could not afford to lose that money.

Months before, consultants to the federal program strongly suggested to state officials that Kentucky’s choice of assessment was a major sticking point in their pursuit of the grant. According to the officials, consultants pushed them to drop the assessment they were using, Pearson’s Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA), and choose the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), which was quickly becoming the most widely used test under Reading First. But there was a problem: One of the consultants on the four-member team had a second job — as a trainer for DIBELS.

Stay tuned. The Vermont Society for the Study of Education is publishing
Examining DIBELS: What It Is and What It Does, edited by Ken Goodman. It will be available soon.

published in Language Magazine, V5:1 pp24-27
by Ken Goodman

If Katrina came close to being the perfect storm--in the awful sense of the storm that had all the attributes to do the most harm to the lives of those whose destructive power and irresistible forces it touched, then there is a perfect literacy test sweeping through American schools and doing the maximum amount of damage to the lives of those it touches.

California State Professor of Literacy Education Margaret Moustafa provides research studies on such topics as The Reading Achievement of Economically-Disadvantaged Children in Urban Schools Using Open Court and Scripted Reading Instruction.

http://www.instructional1.calstatela.edu/mmousta

Michael Pressley
The Reading Teacher, September 2003
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=rt/9-03_column/index.html

. . .Experiments should include students who are the intended targets of the instruction being evaluated Researchers sometimes claim their interventions work with populations of students they have never studied. Although I argued earlier that too many replications should be avoided, it makes sense to replicate intervention effects across populations who might benefit from the type of instruction being studied. For example, we know much more about the effects of phonics interventions on struggling readers than we know about their effects on strong beginning readers. We really do need to study the possible effects of such interventions on nonstruggling readers, because in many U.S. schools today the full range of beginning readers is receiving a lot of phonics instruction. Might that instruction bore better readers, perhaps reducing their motivation for reading and artificially compressing their reading achievement? Might an overemphasis on phonics instruction slow down nonstruggling readers' progress toward fluency, forcing attention to sounding out long after they really need to attend to the separate sounds and their blending? As far as I can tell, we have not really documented what happens when excellent beginning readers experience heavy doses of phonics instruction. We simply assume that what is good for weaker readers must also be good for the best beginning readers. Maybe it is, but I'm not so sure. Claims of broad applicability of an intervention require studies of it with a variety of populations. . . .

Michael Pressley, Michigan State University
Convention of American Psychological Association, Honolulu, July 30, 2004
(Hospitalization prevented Pressley from giving the talk.)

. . . [W]hen I talk about phonemic awareness, I say some like this: “Folks, phonemic awareness is a really basic understanding. Even two- and three- year-olds use a lot of whole words as they talk. These children eventually become phonemically aware, when they realize that the whole words are made up of separate sounds that blend together, when they realize that the word “dog

Walmsley, S. A. (1979). Reading Research Quarterly 14(4): 574-604.

Found non-words provided less reliable estimates of decoding development than did low frequency real words. Argues that many criterion-referenced skills tests set accuracy levels on nonsense word reaing that could not be met by the top 20% of readers in grade 5. "To set mastery levels that are higher than the typical performance of the best readers would seem to require some justification." p. 598 Notes some phonics tests, Bryant, seem to do just
this.

"From a poor performance on nonsense syllables, a poor performance on real