Our district uses DIBELS also. Students are tested at grade level (ex: all my 3rd graders, regardless of their ability level, read the same 3 third grade passages for the benchmarks). I have a real problem with the leveling of the passages. It seems to me that if you are assessing fluency in a beginning of the year 3rd grader, the passage should be leveled at beginning third. But the way DIBELS is set up, all three passages are at different levels-easy (supposedly), middle, and hard. If you go to the University of Oregon website or to the DIBELS home page, there is a listing of technical papers. In one of them, the are tables of each passage of each grade level that give the levels of all passages- benchmark and progress monitoring. They've used the Spache leveling, which leveled all of them lower that any of the other leveling programs. There is a huge difference between the programs on the same passages. For this and a few other reasons, I don't put a lot of stock in DIBEls. Cheryle New Mexico
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