[Reading-hall-of-fame] The problem is DIBELS not fluency

[richardallington at aol.com]

 The only reason we are having this discussion about fluency is the popular use of the DIBELS test (and its cousin AIMSWeb testing), at least in American schools. These assessments with their accompanying handheld technology for recording performances and then the ability to produce multiple individual, group, school, or district graphs of "progress" make it seem scientific and in schools lessons target faster reading to obtain better DIBELS scores. Given that in 2006 the college of ed at U of Oregon reported it received some $6 million dollars in royalty share payments (50%) from DIBELS in return for having allowed faculty released time to develop DIBELS, one can see the financial lure of developing and selling such a test, even if it doesn't measure fluency or anything else related to reading development. 

 

Dick Allington
University of Tennessee
A209 Claxton
 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Olson <dolson at oise.utoronto.ca>
To: Jay Samuels <samue001 at umn.edu>
Cc: 'HOFLists' <reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>; 'William Teale' <wteale at uic.edu>
Sent: Thu, Nov 19, 2009 12:13 pm
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Dissolving fluency into useful parts


Dear Jay et al:

I think Jay's comment is helpful in dissolving the notion of "fluency" into components that, unlike fluency, are relevant to reading, namely, "decoding and comprehending at the same time".  But distinguishing decoding and comprehension is somewhat puzzling to me and perhaps requires that we "caliberate our instruments", i.e., adopt a common vocabulary.  Decoding to me is recognizing a word and that implies that we understand the word; we know it is a word we know.  But that sounds a lot like comprehension.  In fact, understanding and comprehending are synonyms.  But if we allow "comprehension" to mean something like sentence or text comprehension, then Jay can have his two factors at the same time, understanding the words and linking the word into a comprehensible text.  I would agree that this is critical to competent reading.  Can you, Jay, live with that?

I would hope, thereby, that we have eliminated the necessity for talking about "fluency" except in Arthur  Appleee's sense of "fluency in English", said informally of a second language learner.  Fluency as a direct indication of reading competence is dangerous as many have implied in that it legitimizes the use of such tests as the Dibels.  The danger of Dibels is that if it is accepted as a legitimate measure of reading, pedagogical efforts will be directed to performing well on such tests at the expense of actual reading.  So would it not be better to just say that fluency is an oversimplified and misleading indication of reading competence?

David Olson
 
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