DIBELS

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Home : 2005 : April : 29

DIBELS
By Ashley Morse

DIBELS is great if all you care about is your students' rate. The actual assessment varies depending on the grade level, but for upper elementary it will test rate and a retell. HOWEVER, the retell is ignored when you go
to post your scores on their website where you can track your students. Basically, they operate on the premise that fluency predicts comprehension. This may be true for some students, but definitely not for ELL students in my experience. Anyway, if you do use it, just make sure you take the retell scores into consideration. Although, they do have an interesting way to score the retelling

of the reading. They count every word that the student says that even vaguely relates to what they have read. It cannot be used alone to assess a student's reading level. It definitely should not be used for a reading comprehension level. It does provide valuable information, however, and you can print very informative graphs from the website. Overall, it can provide very positive and interesting data for your school.