DIBELS: The One-Minute Fear Factor Assessment
These DIBELS screening assessments were developed to help educators identify struggling, at-risk readers, so that appropriate types and levels of support can be implemented within the school system. They were designed to support efforts at the primary grade levels (K-6th) to prevent reading struggles as the learn progress through the school system. Furthermore, this test was to aid in the elimination in remediation lessons inside of the classroom.
DIBELS Assessment Areas
The DIBELS assessments are short timed one minute assessments. They are administered individually either by the child’s teacher, or respective staff of their particular school district. This assessment measures the basic skills involved in early literacy. This assessment measures phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge, phonics measure, oral reading fluency (ORF), vocabulary and comprehension (Coulter, Shavin, &, Gichuru, 2009). Good comprehenders have a purpose for reading, and think actively as they read. These test are to be utilize for screening purposes only three t...
This is a reading intervention classroom of six 3rd grade students ages 9-10. This intervention group focuses on phonics, fluency, and comprehension. The students were placed in this group based on the results of the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency assessment. Students in this class lack basic decoding skills.
Arthur Dimmesdale, a character of high reputation, overwhelmed by guilt, torn apart by his own wrongdoing, makes his entrance into history as the tragic hero whose life becomes a montage of pain and agony because of his mistakes. The themes leading to Dimmesdale’s becoming a tragic hero are his guilt from his sin, and his reluctance to tarnish his reputation in the town. Guilt plays a huge role in defining Dimmesdale as a tragic hero. Dimmesdale has understood that by not revealing his sin, he has doomed himself. This also connects with the constant struggle with Chillingworth. The mysteries of Dimmesdale’s guilty heart entice Chillingworth to delve into his soul and reveal what has been hidden, causing Dimmesdale great pain and suffering. His guilt is taking over, causing him to inflict pain upon himself while also experiencing true and meaningful suffering. Guilt is not the only theme in the novel that help to characterize Dimmesdale as a tragic hero, but reputation and authority in the community also help to characterize him as a tragic hero. Arthur Dimmesdale has a grand reputation and authority in his community, which worsens his downfall. The respect he had from his community makes them hurt worse when they see his decline. His excessive pride makes him ignorant to most, until the end when all things go downhill. He also made a life altering decision of whether to stay and face his guilt, or to run away from his mistakes. Arthur Dimmesdale, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, is an example of a tragic hero because of the downfall brought about by his guilt and necessity to uphold his authority in the town.
Love is the greatest human emotion one can experience. In the poem "Leaving the Motel" by W. D. Snodgrass and "Sex Without Love" by Sharon Olds each poet shares different views on the theme of love. Snodgrass' poem focuses on a couple having an affair in a motel. As they are leaving they go through a checklist to make sure they keep their secrecy. While, Olds' poem focuses more about how people have sex without being in love. Both of these poems illustrate a strong sense of love in different ways with the help of point of view, mood, and symbolism.
Assessments should guide instruction and material selection. Any likely manner, assessments should measure student progress, as well as help, identify deficiencies in reading (Afflerback, 2012). One important indicator of reading deficiencies is spelling. Morris (2014), advocated the importance of administering a spelling assessment in order to have a better understanding of a student’s reading abilities. My school uses the Words Their Way spelling inventory to assess students’ reading abilities at the beginning of the year and throughout the reading year.
Kaluger, G. & Kolson, C. J. (1978). Reading and learning disabilities. Ohio, Bell and Howell Company.
DIBELS is short for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. It’s an assortment of tests that determine whether a student may be at risk for literacy trouble. The types of data I would gather for DIBELS would be initial sound fluency, letter naming fluency, phoneme segmentation fluency, and nonsense word fluency. The DIBELS tests are taken three times throughout the year: beginning, middle, and end.
The causes of reading difficulties often arise because of learning disabilities such as dyslexia, poor preparation before entering school, no value for literacy, low school attendance, insufficient reading instruction, and/or even the way students were taught to read in the early grades. The struggles that students “encounter in school can be seen as socially constructed-by the ways in which schools are organized and scheduled, by assumptions that are made about home life and school abilities, by a curriculum that is often devoid of connections to students’ lives, and by text that may be too difficult for students to read” (Hinchman, and Sheridan-Thomas166). Whatever the reason for the existence of the reading problem initially, by “the time a [student] is in the intermediate grades, there is good evidence that he will show continued reading g...
In this time, it has become highly regarded by many teachers and administrators. The program uses a site word approach to teach emergent reading skills. The program uses a carefully sequenced, highly repetitive word recognition method combined with errorless learning. This approach eliminates incorrect responses and helps students view themselves as readers. The Edmark Reading Program ensures success to students of all ages who have not yet mastered beginning reading. This program is recommended for students with developmental disabilities or Autism, students with learning disabilities, Title 1 students, ESL students, preschool and kindergarten students who lack vocabulary development and non-readers who struggle with phonics. The programs
The program works with more than 100 schools in seven states. The program is geared toward students from low-income families. The statistics for children’s literacy in the United States are astonishing. “In 2011, just thirty-four percent of the nation’s fourth graders in public school could read proficiently” (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). The program itself has had exponential success.
Forty-four million adults in the United States are unable to read a simple story to their children, and 50 percent of adults have literacy skills below an eighth grade level (Literacy Project Foundation, 2015). A contributing factor to this situation is that many secondary students are graduating high school with the inability to read at a college and career reading level. Studies have found that only 36 percent of high school seniors performed at or above the proficient reading level, while 27 percent performed below the basic level (U.S. Department of Education, 2013), and only 44 percent of high school students in the United States met the reading-readiness benchmark on the 2013 ACT college entrance exam (Alliance for Excellent Education,
Reading Methods and Learning Disabilities. (1998, April). Learning Disabilities Association Newsbrief, 38(4). Retrieved December 18, 2013
Martínez, Harris and McClain (2014) maintain that, “among all of the academic skills a student learns in school, none is more fundamental than reading” Furthermore, they believe that competence in reading is essential for education, employment, productive citizenship, and living a successful and satisfying life. (p. 129) Daggett and Pedinotti (2014) explain that “life outside of school requires substantially higher levels of reading proficiency than most students experience in the high school classroom and even in post‐secondary education” (p. 1). Students, who struggle with reading in early elementary years, tend to fall farther behind as they progress through the educational system. Fiester (2010) confirms, “The National Research Council asserts academic success, as defined by high school graduation, can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing someone’s reading skill at the end of third grade” (p.9) Thus, efforts to meet the needs of all learners remains a priority across the nation. As a result, states and districts require schools to submit school improvement plans, which identify specific needs based on data, strategic goals and instructional strategies targeted toward
Literacy is an important part of life; whether in school or on the job, words are all around. Today, fourteen percent of the United States population does not know how to read (The U.S. Illiteracy Rate Hasn’t Changed In 10 Years). Though fourteen percent seems trivial, when put into a number it is equivalent to 5,460,000 people who cannot read at a functional level in the United States. For literacy rates to rise, our country needs to take a more active role in homes, communities, and in schools. To solve this problem, literacy must be defined, statistics need to be examined, issues which arise due to illiteracy must be recognized, diagnostics of reading problems need to be understood and acknowledged, and solutions should be brought to the
Most schools systems have a Literacy Assessment that is given at the beginning of the year. The types of Literacy Assessments include: Map Testing; Star Reading; and PALS (Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening). However, “Universal literacy screenings such as DIBELS Next and AIMSweb are often characterized as fluency assessments because they measure both accuracy and efficiency in completing tasks,” (Munger, n.d.). While these assessments assist core-content teachers in determining where a student stands in the fluency of reading, teachers in other non-core content areas, such as Business Education might not be privy to test score results.