Problem Analysis
Why is it happining?
Lets take a look a the data that has been collected for Andy.
Andy's Assessments
1st Grade DIBELS
At an end of 1st grade Andy completed Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) battery and reached all DIBELS benchmarks, however reading fluency progressed slowly.
2nd grade DIBELS
Nonsense Word Fluency = 40 sounds per minute.
Oral Reading Fluency =15 words per minute.
Click the image to enlarge.
Other Assessments
Andy's Developmental Reading Assessment was a level 4 and he was in the lowest reading group. We need to determine which assessments will be most helpful in identifying an area of concern for Andy.
To better define the problem let us work to understand what these assessments are quantifying in relation to the 5 components of reading.
What Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills Measures
The DIBELS measures were specifically designed to assess 3 of the 5 Big Ideas of early literacy: Phonological Awareness, Alphabetic Principle, and Fluency with Connected Text. The measures are linked to one another, both psychometrically and theoretically, and have been found to be predictive of later reading proficiency.- Measures of Phonological Awareness:
- Initial Sounds Fluency (ISF): Assesses a child's skill to identify and produce the initial sound of a given word
- Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF): Assesses a child's skill to produce the individual sounds within a given word
- Measure of Alphabetic Principle:
- Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF): Assesses a child's knowledge of letter-sound correspondences as well their ability to blend letters together to form unfamiliar "nonsense" (e.g., fik, lig, etc.) words
- Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF): Assesses a child's knowledge of letter-sound correspondences as well their ability to blend letters together to form unfamiliar "nonsense" (e.g., fik, lig, etc.) words
- Measure of Fluency with Connected Text:
- Oral Reading Fluency (ORF): Assesses a child's skill of reading connected text in grade-level material word
The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills.
Quiz
Since these assessments are standardized and scores are reported as benchmarks we can use Andy's scores to determine where his ability level is compared to other students. Lets analyze Andy's sub-test scores on the DIBELS test to see if there are any clues to underlying problems.
What the Developmental Reading Assessment Measures
Developmental Reading Assessment(DRA) reports that the assessment measures the following areas:- Phonological Awareness -- Through a variety of tasks, students must demonstrate awareness of rhyme, alliteration, and phoneme awareness.
- Metalanguage -- Students must demonstrate knowledge of the words used to talk about print language.
- Letter/High-Frequency Words -- Students must identify upper- and lower-case letters as well as graded lists of high-frequency "sight" words.
- Phonics -- Through a variety of tasks, students must correctly spell words, correctly identify words, and identify words that share certain characteristics with target words.
- Structural Analysis and Syllabication -- students must segment words into syllables, and must analyze word parts (prefix, suffix, etc.) to determine the meaning of a word.
- Oral Reading Accuracy -- As the student reads each passage of text aloud, the teacher makes notes of oral reading "miscues," categorizing each type of oral reading error.
- Oral Reading Fluency -- As the student reads each passage aloud, the teacher makes notes of oral reading rate and oral reading expression.
- Oral Reading Comprehension -- The teacher asks questions of the student and evaluates the quality of the student's response using a rubric. Questions reflect different types of comprehension skills (literal, interpretation, reflection, prediction, summarization, etc.)
The assessment gives the teacher an overall glimpse of the child's reading performance and addresses several of the big 5 components of reading . However, the scores used in the reporting of assessment results have limited value in diagnosing areas of concern because the test is not standardized and does not directly correlate to the 5 components of reading.
This is a criterion-referenced assessment; no normative data is provided. Student scores are translated into reading level, and described in terms of Intervention, Instructional, Independent, and Advanced. Publishers report that research is being conducted to establish percentiles and stanines.
-SEDL Reading Assessment Database for Grades K-2
Verify
Take a look at the expanded concept map that matches assesments to Andy's reading problems.
Click the image to enlarge.
Which is more of a concern reading fluency or alphabetic knowledge?
