Show me the (reading) Data!
Question from a parent: What can I do to track my child’s progress? Specifically, how often should the District communicate progress towards a child’s reading goals? No matter the methodology used, you must be able to objectively measure the data. One way the school can monitor your child’s progress is with the Dynamic Indicator of Basic Early Literacy Skills (Dibels) or Aimsweb. Both are norm-referenced benchmark assessments and provide both age and grade equivalencies for progress monitoring. It is important to note that DIBELS and Aimsweb are only “indicators” of a student’s overall reading status, and are not intended to be in-depth or comprehensive measures of reading. They are not to be considered diagnostic reading assessments for identifying a child’s specific areas of strengths and weaknesses or determining any difficulties that a child may have in learning to read and/or the potential cause of such difficulties, and do not help to determine possible reading intervention strategies and related special needs. This should be done annually! (More on this in a later post!).
Both Dibels and Aimsweb offer one-minute assessments for oral reading fluency, providing for rate and accuracy and report in words read correctly per minute. When used as progress monitoring tool, the school may complete at least one of the individual DIBELS tests as often as once a week!
If your child has a reading goal(s) on his or her IEP, it is important to request and receive this reading data weekly. You want to have this documented (in writing) in your actual IEP. Often, a school will respond that they cannot probe weekly. This is untrue. Each DIBELS probe takes approximately one+ minute to complete. The close monitoring of this progress is very important because it will help determine the effectiveness of the methodology and allows appropriate course-correction. You will know within 2-3 weeks whether or not your child is making progress as you should see a rate of 1 - 2 words gained successfully per week (per grade, see graph). Using the ORF CBM norm, you can graph and track your child’s progress. By using your child’s scores and your IEP goal, you can track the rate of growth by the number of weeks of instruction. Visual representations of your child’s progress (or lack thereof) are extremely effective tools in an IEP meeting. [**Disclosure: I am not a reading specialist, however I am an advocate who loves data, charts, and graphs. The visual proof demonstrating an undebatable lack of progress creates a deafening silence in an IEP meeting.]
