Form effects on the estimation of students' oral reading fluency using DIBELS

Abstract

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 formulae. 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. Fluency and Curriculum Based Measurement (CBM)Fluency, the ability to read text aloud with speed, accuracy, and prosody is an important skill in reading development (National Reading Panel; NRP, 2000;Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) It represents a directly observable analog to the automatic word recognition skills that support silent reading. While a struggling reader attends mainly to the process of decoding words in the text, a fluent reader expends less cognitive resources on decoding allowing the reader to concentrate on the meaning of the text. This relationship between fluency and comprehension has been argued theoretically (e.g., Perfetti's verbal efficiency theory, 1985) and studied empirically, where it has been shown across a variety of settings and contexts using different measures of fluency and comprehension, that a fluent reader is more likely to have better comprehension skills (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001;Young & Bowers, 1995;Nathan & Stanovich, 1991; LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). Because of the tight empirical and theoretical link between fluency and comprehension and the relative ease of assessing fluency over comprehension, fluency assessments are often used as proxies to monitor student growth in reading.Corresponding Author: David J. Francis, The University of Houston. dfrancis@uh.edu, 832.842.7036 Fax:713.747.7532. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM)Progress monitoring assessments of fluency are often used in the classroom to provide teachers and other professionals with regular feedback on students' rate of skill acquisition. Such assessments help to identify students needing modifications of their current instruction based on slower than expected rate...

Towards Understanding Text Factors in Oral Reading

“…In particular, since comprehension complexity of a passage is known to impact reading comprehension, it seems reasonable to assume that it would also impact other aspects of reading skill, including oral reading fluency. In fact, this assumption underlies text selection for tests of oral reading fluency such as DIBELS (Good and Kaminski, 2002) that rely on readability to select comparable passages (Francis et al, 2008). Yet research also suggests that controlling for readability does not entirely solve the problem of text-based variation in reading fluency.…”

Avanços no conhecimento do processamento da fluência em leitura: da palavra ao texto

“…Ainda, em relação à definição de fluência na leitura, esta é a habilidade de ler textos em voz alta com velocidade, precisão e prosódia adequada, sendo um fator importante no desenvolvimento da leitura, que representa uma relação direta com a habilidade de reconhecimento automático de palavras que dão apoio na leitura silenciosa (25) . Completando essa idéia, uma leitura eficiente é composta por uma fluência, alcançada por meio de um bom desenvolvimento das representações fonológicas das palavras, além da capacidade do sujeito de processá-las de forma rápida, utilizando o mínimo de recursos cognitivos na decodificação, voltando a sua atenção, em maior parte, à compreensão (2) .…”

Disfluências e velocidade de fala em produção espontânea e em leitura oral em indivíduos gagos e não gagos

“…Reading aloud is processed by perception and verbalization of the written text, i.e., the written text is reproduced through speech (3) . The ability to read texts aloud with appropriate speed, accuracy and prosody is an important feature of the development of reading itself and represents a direct relationship with the automatic recognition of words ability (4) . The efficient reading is fluent and is achieved through the successful development of phonological representations of words, as well as the ability to process them quickly and automatically, with minimal cognitive resources while decoding.…”