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

Sun Nov 22 14:15:13 GMT 2009

Reading
<http://www.reading.org/Library/Retrieve.cfm?D=10.1598/RRQ.42.4.5&F=RRQ-42-4
-Riedel_lastpage.html>  Research Quarterly : October/November/December 2007
: The ...

The DIBELS Tests: Is Speed of Barking at Print What We Mean by Reading
Fluency? S. Jay Samuels, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA ...

Between Allington,'s comments and Olson's comments I hardly know where to
begin. In the December, 2007 RRQ I blasted the DIBELS tests. If you have not
read it [it is very short] you can probably get it off the internet.  I
attack the so=called validation studies as being invalid because they mimic
what non fluent readers do. If they had done their tests properly they would
have found that speed in many cases is not a good indicator of
comprehension.  If you are studying for the written doctoral exams you may
want to slow down in order to understand what you are reading. Often, speed
is the enemy of comprehension, and in my article I refer to a published
study which failed to find a significant correlation between speed and
comprehension when the task demanded simultaneous decoding and
comprehension,  as I define the skill. In the original review of that study
the author of the study made apologies for the failure to find the typical
finding that speed and comprehension correlate. I, on the other hand, as a
reviewer was excited and made a convincing case to publish the study. In
this study the reading task demands required simultaneous decoding and
comprehension. If you have the time you might read the RRQ article in which
I attack the Dibels  group for doing their tests in ways that mimic what
poor readers do. 

I agree with Allington that the DIBELS group is largely to blame for a host
of problems, one of which is attaching the term "fluency" to each of their
tests that measure nothing more than accuracy and speed of decoding.   'With
one exception, none of their tests measures comprehension, only oral reading
speed.  That one test that makes a feeble attempt to measure comprehension
may be the most unreliable test ever produced. Mike Pressley and his co
authors attacked the unreliability of the instrument and when there is
unreliability there is no validity. When the Oregon group invited Pressley
to Oregon to talk about his misgivings, he declined, and in his typical
"tongue in cheek" manner said he declined because he felt he wouldn't be
safe there. Too bad Pressley died. I can assure you that if he were alive he
would be part of this discussion. 

Let me jump over to Olson's concerns. To him, decoding implies comprehension
of word meaning. But the term "decoding" does not imply comprehension as I
conceptualize the reading process. To me, for want of a better word decoding
simply means saying the word or its subliminal phonological representation.
For example, give me a Spanish text to read orally. I can read it orally at
very high speeds but my understanding of the text is minimal because of my
limited knowledge of Spanish vocabulary and grammar. For me, decoding and
comprehension are two distinct components of thereading process.

As long as I am on this roll, let me continue for a few more moments on
fluency.  We often talk about fluency as if a person were fluent or not. In
fact fluency is both situational and it is developmental . I can assure you
that all the people who have added their two cents to this discussion are
fluent readers on some texts but not on all texts. If you are reading a text
on a topic with unfamiliar vocabulary or concepts, you may find that the
decoding and comprehension are not taking place at the same time. In this
sense fluency is situational. Fluency is developmental in the sense that a
sixth grade student might be fluent on a text written for first graders but
the same student might be non fluent on a college text. In time, with
practice, the sixth grader may become a fluent reader of college level
texts. I agree with Olson it would be nice if we could agree on what we mean
when we use a term such as fluency or decoding.  And with this, I think it
is time to stop .      

From: reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of
richardallington at aol.com
Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 8:53 AM
To: dolson at oise.utoronto.ca; reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] The problem is DIBELS not fluency

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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