[MOSAIC] Dibbels Assessments

[Mholley112 at aol.com]

Our district uses DIBELS also. Students are tested at grade level (ex: all  
my 3rd graders, regardless of their ability level, read the same 3 third grade  
passages for the benchmarks). I have a real problem with the leveling of the  
passages. It seems to me that if you are assessing fluency in a beginning of 
the  year 3rd grader, the passage should be leveled at beginning third. But 
the way  DIBELS is set up, all three passages are at different levels-easy 
(supposedly),  middle, and hard. If you go to the University of Oregon website or 
to the DIBELS  home page, there is a listing of technical papers. In one of 
them, the are  tables of each passage of each grade level that give the levels of 
all passages-  benchmark and progress monitoring. They've used the Spache 
leveling, which  leveled all of them lower that any of the other leveling 
programs. There is a  huge difference between the programs on the same passages. 
 
For this and a few other reasons, I don't put a lot of stock in  DIBEls.
 
Cheryle
New Mexico



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