top of page
Search
kymstilgenbauer002

How to Use DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency Passages to Monitor Student Progress



The DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency measure is a standardized, individually administered test of accuracy and fluency with connected text. The DORF passages and procedures are based on the program of research and development of Curriculum-Based Measurement of Reading by Stan Deno and colleagues at the University of Minnesota and using the procedures described in Shinn (1989). A version of CBM reading also has been published as The Test of Reading Fluency (TORF) (Children's Educational Services, 1987).




dibels oral reading fluency passages



DORF is a standardized set of passages and administration procedures designed to (a) identify children who may need additional instructional support, and (b) monitor progress toward instructional goals. The passages are calibrated for the goal level of reading for each grade level.


Student performance is measured by having students read a passage aloud for one minute. Words omitted, substituted, and hesitations of more than three seconds are scored as errors. Words self-corrected within three seconds are scored as accurate. The number of correct words per minute from the passage is the oral reading fluency rate.


This study examined the effects of passage and presentation order on progress monitoring assessments of oral reading fluency in 134 second grade students. The students were randomly assigned to read six one-minute passages in one of six fixed orders over a seven week period. The passages had been developed to be comparable based on readability formulas. Estimates of oral reading fluency varied across the six stories (67.9 to 93.9), but not as a function of presentation order. These passage effects altered the shape of growth trajectories and affected estimates of linear growth rates, but were shown to be removed when forms were equated. Explicit equating is essential to the development of equivalent forms, which can vary in difficulty despite high correlations across forms and apparent equivalence through readability indices.


This assessment measures print concept and reading behaviors through a digital running record assessment that has students read authentic texts and answer comprehension questions about increasingly complex texts through retell/recall, and/or oral comprehension and written comprehension tasks.


Instructional resources provide grade-level passages and best-practice lesson templates for close-reading and comprehension tasks. The lesson templates cover a wide range of reading comprehension skills that can be applied with the accompanied passages for additional practice in reading for deeper comprehension.


OverviewDORF is comprised of two components: Oral Reading and Passage Retell. The oral reading component assesses the student's ability to read connected text fluently and with accuracy. The passage retell component assesses the student's comprehension, determined by both the number of words used and a quality of response rubric. DORF is administered MOY Grade 1 through EOY Grade 6.


The use of oral reading fluency (ORF) passages within a Response to Intervention (RTI) framework is examined. Significant limitations within the current ORF research are discussed. The passage equivalency and readability scores for DIBELS Next, AIMSweb, and a school district's curriculum's ORF passages are evaluated using Generalizability Theory and readability formulas. Multiple regression is used to analyze the contribution of ORF progress monitoring passages for predicting the California Standards Test (CST). The optimal number of ORF passages to administer is also examined. Participants consisted of third and fifth grade students from an urban school district in Southern California. Results indicate that readability formulas provide wide range of scores for individual passages but rank sets of passages fairly equally. Results also indicate that ORF passages have high levels of reliability and variance attributable to student skill. Finally, results also indicate that the addition of progress monitoring did not increase the predictive validity of the CSTs. The implications, limitations, and future direction of research are discussed.


Currently there is no agreed-upon method for determining the difficulty level, referred to as the readability level, of Reading Curriculum-Based Measurement (R-CBM) passages. A key tenant of R-CBM is that the passages across each grade level are equivalent in difficulty level and therefore can be used to monitor student academic improvement. The primary objective in this study was to evaluate the homogeneity of oral reading fluency progress monitoring passages of two popular passage sets that are used frequently in schools. The purpose of this research was to examine the stability of each R-CBM progress monitoring passage set as well as determine whether there is any benefit to organizing the progress monitoring passages into triad sets for interpretation. The results indicated even with the most current methods of equating progress monitoring passages, error related to passage difficulty continues to persist. It is clear that using strong tactics such as a well developed readability formulas, as well as field testing passages, leads to a better equated passage set. In addition, analyzing progress once there has been three assessments given across time, rather than after each individual progress monitoring session, leads to considerably better information regarding student reading growth with reduced error related to passage difficulty level. 2ff7e9595c


0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page