Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Dibels/Diebels Assessment

My daughter switched from charter to public this year, which overall has been a very good thing for her.

Except for leveled reading. Her charter school used the A-Z levels, but did not do formal assessments. She left first grade on a Level V for comprehension, fluency, inferential, etc.

Her new school has placed her on a level K. Her teacher explained that it largely has to do with the fact that they start with non-fiction, and while she couldn't show me the actual assessment, she said my DD got stuck on questions that asked about things like "text features".

When looking at her DIBEL scores afterwards, it seems so incongruent with the reading level they assigned to her. The kids are required to do 45 minutes of Leveled reading in the classroom each day....she is bored to death during this time. Short of teaching her the new-to-her vocabulary that accompanies the leveled assessment questions ("text features", "text structures", timelines, alliteration, etc) to help her bump up faster, I'm at a loss of what to do.

These are her DIBEL Scores, BOY

NWF-CLS: 80 (Goal 54)
NWF-WWR: 24 (Goal 13)
DORF-Fluency: 164 (Goal 52)
DORF-Accuracy: 100 (Goal 90)
DORF-Retell: 99 (Goal 16)

WR (don't know what this is):
List B: 24 (max. score 24)
List C: 24 (max. score 24)

ETA: Her MAP-Reading Score was also in the 99th percentile, scoring high in all of the sub-categories, including non-fiction/informational texts.

Our school uses Dibels as a grade level test to look for deficits. If the goal is 10 - they don't care whether you get an 11 or a 20 as long as you are not below the goal. Even my gifted dyslexic reached the goal on Dibels.

On the other hand, MAP is a "smart test" that does not ceiling at grade level. It keeps getting more difficult until the kid meets the discontinue criteria. If your kid is in the 99th percentile for grade, I think that you have a good argument for more difficult text.

With some of the lower level non-fiction texts, we've seen interest level affect performance. If my kids weren't interested, their performance suffered. Maybe you could ask the teacher to let her try the "V" level work? Does he/she seem open to discussion?

I don't know much about these reading tests. But I would talk with her teacher about teaching her the new-to-her vocabulary and retesting her. That might make all the difference in moving her to a better reading level.

In 2nd grade my son took a math pretest at the beginning of the year. Teacher told us our son did well and got 100% on everything but left all of the division problems blank. I was perplexed because I knew he knew how to divide. I took a look at the test and it was written using a nomenclature that DS had never seen. Once he understood the new symbol he was able to easily do all the division problems.

MAP has no discontinue rule based on incorrect responses. It is a set number of items administered to each child, but in an adaptive item selection environment, with discontinuation based only on completing your quota of items.

DIBELS is primarily aimed at lower elementary (the whole range is K-6), with at-risk/below-grade-level students its principal population.

NWF=nonsense word fluency, a measure of phonetic decoding skills. At the 2nd grade level, it consists largely of VC and CVC pseudowords (V=short vowel, C=consonant).

(D)ORF=oral reading fluency, a measure of reading speed, and (surprisingly) the best quick measure of reading comprehension.

WR=most likely grade level word lists, including high-frequency words (e.g., Dolch words for first or second grade).

You may find this benchmarking document of interest:
https://dibels.uoregon.edu/docs/DIBELSNextRecommendedBenchmarkGoals.pdf

Note especially that the last page, where the 6th grade benchmarks are, indicates that she has met all of them. I would suggest that this may be useful data for advocacy.

Can you do a cross-grade comparison with scores on the DIBEL? Does a 164 DORF-Fluency in 2nd grade equally compare to a 164 on DORFF in 6th?

Oops. Got me. Yes, the ORF numbers are based on grade-level text. Those passages are available to the school, though. You could still use these numbers to say that current DiBELS data do not accurately reflect her reading level (they are discrepant from A to Z, after all), so she should at least be re-assessed on higher grade ORF passages.