It may be a matter of how basic skills and or populations are defined,
but the NAAL FAN report suggesting that "most of the adults in the
country are probably off the chart for basic skills" doesn't jive with
my experience. 

 

it would seem to me that the bottom 50% would be an appropriate norming
sample. 

 

The passing scores on the GED are at the 40th percentile of high school
graduates.  Add to this reality the number of adults that earned a high
school diploma with the minimum level of basic skills, and the fact that
both of these groups fall far short of the level of literacy that we
hope for in our adult population, it would seem that the bottom 50%
would still be quite appropriate.

 

Jim Schneider 

 

 

From: assessment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:assessment-bounces at nifl.gov]
On Behalf Of Sabatini, John
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 1:39 PM
To: The Assessment Discussion List
Subject: [Assessment 1945] Re: DIBELS

 

I recommend you also keep after us at ETS.  Our team has developed a set
of component/diagnostic measures for use with adult literacy learners
and have piloted them with ABE adults in our intervention studies and
also with adolescent struggling readers.  We also do not have national
norms for you yet, but we have the measures (computerized), so we are
probably getting close.  A national norming sample is an expensive,
somewhat complicated thing to do - probably most of the expense of any
published test is getting the norming sample and analyzing it.  


Part of our delay is the odd circumstance of adult basic education.  As
the NAAL FAN report shows, most of the adults in the country are
probably off the top of the chart for basic skills - or at least high
enough that one is not likely to provide additional basic skills
testing.  So the normative sample we need is relative to a special
population - ABE students and ELL students.  Otherwise, all we'll learn
is that all of the ABE students are in the bottom 25th percentile in the
country.  The tests need to be designed to discriminate well among that
bottom 25th percentile.  So, we would most likely need to sample from
literacy programs across the country - and making them take more tests!
Then, it would still not be sound to generalize to non-program adults,
but that might not be too large a problem.  Perhaps we can generate some
momentum among providers for a study of that kind.

 

John

 

 

________________________________

From: assessment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:assessment-bounces at nifl.gov]
On Behalf Of Jean Marrapodi
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 2:04 PM
To: 'The Assessment Discussion List'
Subject: [Assessment 1944] Re: DIBELS

Thanks Bob!

I contacted DIBELS as well and they said they had no studies regarding
adults. Seeing that there would be no place to enter data for adult
scores makes a big difference in the decision whether this would be
usable at all for my population. I'm trying to find something that can
assist the teachers assess and track this lowest level population at a
granular level without reinventing the wheel.  DIBELS has the
granularity of the skills I'm looking for.

 

So much of our adult literacy material is paper and pencil and labor
intensive. I have the Bader, which is complex and not user friendly. I
have a slew of individual diagnostics for word recognition, vocabulary
meaning, phonemic analysis, etc. I'm looking for simple.

 

I wonder if I could reopen that discussion with DIBELS, and if it would
be worth it.

I've also contacted CAL about a project they did with bilingual
Spanish/English K-2 children learning to read. We have a slew of new
Spanish speaking learners who arrived with minimal education in L1, so
in many ways they are paralleling these children. Of course in many ways
the don't, but what's out there for them? Our lowest literacy folks have
such sparsely of diagnostics we need to borrow across the realms of
K-12.

 

 

	


Jean Marrapodi, PhD, CPLP

teacher by training, learner by design
jmarrapodi at applestar.org <mailto:rejoicer at aol.com> 
mobile: 401.440.6165
<http://www.plaxo.com/click_to_call?lang=en&src=jj_signature&To=401%2E44
0%2E6165&Email=rejoicer at aol.com> 
www.applestar.org <http://www.applestar.org/>  

 

	

 

 

 

 

From: assessment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:assessment-bounces at nifl.gov]
On Behalf Of Hughes, Robert
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 12:25 PM
To: The Assessment Discussion List
Subject: [Assessment 1933] Re: DIBELS

 

A year or so ago, I decided to see if DIBELS could be adapted to adult
ed settings.  I contacted the researchers who designed it at the
University of Oregon (https://dibels.uoregon.edu/) to see what they
thought.  They seemed to think that the measures would be appropriate,
and I agree with John's assessment below that there could be some uses.

 

Here's the rub, though.  The way that CMBs like DIBELS work is that they
rely on input from large number of users to generate norms that teachers
can use to assess individual students.  This works well because DIBELS
is gathering scores from a wide range of users from all over the
country.  The number and diversity of users provides a natural sampling
that provides a pretty accurate and constantly updated norming process.
DIBELS is, therefore, normed to the K-12 population pretty well.

 

There isn't a category for entering adult learning scores into DIBELS,
and that needs to be done before it can be appropriately normed.  And
rather than grade-level norms, someone would have to generate norms that
are closer aligned to the norms that we use in adult ed.  My brief
discussion with the DIBELS folks suggest that they aren't averse to
doing this -- but that people haven't approached them with the request.
I'm guessing that if enough people start contacting them, they might
respond.

 

Bob H.

 

Bob Hughes, Ed.D.
Associate Professor of Adult Education
Seattle University
410 Loyola Hall

901 12th Ave

PO Box 222000, Seattle WA 98122

Ph:  206-296-6168
E-mail:  rhughes at seattleu.edu 

 

________________________________

From: assessment-bounces at nifl.gov on behalf of Sabatini, John
Sent: Thu 5/28/2009 6:42 AM
To: The Assessment Discussion List
Subject: [Assessment 1929] Re: DIBELS

Hi,

 

I'd also recommend the following references for thinking about how to
assess and think about fluency measures with adult learners.  The first
two are actually from the 4th grade special studies of Oral reading
conducting by the NAEP.  The reason to look at them is to see how the
authors constucted the fluency/prosody/expressiveness subscale and to
understand a bit about the distinctions between rate (words per minute),
accuracy (percentage correct), and words correct per minute.  As the
Wayman report points out, 4th grade is a key developmental year for the
strength of the relationship between oral reading and comprehension in
children. The national sampling is sound. The Wayman article introduces
all the variations of oral reading tasks and what aspects might matter
in choosing one.  One can also read nearly anything by Tim Shanahan.

 

DIBELS has been an exemplar of a Curriculum-based Measures (CBM)
approach.  The goal of that research had been to use fluency-type
measures as a proxy for predicting reading comprehension.
Interestingly, the focus has been less on the subgoal/subskill of
improving children's reading fluency.  The DIBELS technical reports
still provide some useful benchmarks for thinking about the development
of reading rate and fluency, but as the previous post notes, be cautious
about applying any rules as is with adults. They do continue to improve
the technical aspects.

 

Of course, we continue to recommend you look at the NCES Basic Skills
report that was just published, as we gave a national sample of  some
19000 adults two passages -- one at about 2nd-6th grade level another at
7th-8th grade level.  While we cannot at present create a normative
scale for those particular passages, as we develop further reports, the
results can be a guide to expectations for adult readers.  Our research
team here is also conducting research on adult reading fluency, though
we don't have particular assessments to recommend at this time.
Hopefully, we'll have more helpful reports out there for you soon.

 

I think one of the main purposes in reading fluency assessments with
adults is to monitor the improvement of accuracy, rate, and
fluency/prosody/expressiveness (I think referred to here as chunking for
syntax, grammar) over time with texts of increasing challenge.  So, it
is the repeating of the activity over time and the recording of rates
and accuracy and ease to see if there is improvement.   I don't trust
readability formulas for equating texts - don't expect any two texts
with the same readability index to be of equal difficulty in terms of
reading rate for any adult.  However, adults and most readers are
roughly consistent in their reading rates across a relatively wide
variety of texts - until they get so difficult that the individual is
struggling with every word.  I actually prefer picking easy texts
relative to the adults word reading ability when monitoring continuous
text reading fluency.  There are separate measures one can use for word
recognition and decoding. 

 

Finally, McShane's report applies this to adults.

 

John

 

 

Daane, M. C., Campbell, J. R., Grigg, W. S., Goodman, M. J., & Oranje,
A. (2005). Fourth-grade students reading aloud: NAEP 2002 special study
of oral reading (No. NCES 2006-469). Washington, DC: U. S. Department of
Education, Institution of Education Sciences, National Center for
Educational Statistics.

Pinnell, G. S., Pikulski, J. J., Wikxson, K. K., Campbell, J. R., Gough,
P. B., & Beatty, A. S. (1995). Listening to children read aloud: Data
from NAEP's Integrated Reading Performance Record (IRPR) at grade 4 (No.
NAEP-23-FR-04; NCES-95-726). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

Samuels, S. J. (2006). Toward a model of reading fluency. In S. J.
Samuels & A. E. Farstrup (Eds.), What research has to say about fluency
instruction (pp. 24-46). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Wayman, M. M., Wallace, T., Wiley, H. I., Ticha, R., & Espin, C. A.
(2007). Literature synthesis on curriculum-based measurement in reading.
The Journal of Special Education, 41(2), 85-120.

 

McShane, S. (2005). Applying Research in Reading Instruction for Adults:

First Steps for Teachers. Washington, DC: National Center for Family
Literacy, National Institute for Literacy.

 

 

________________________________

From: assessment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:assessment-bounces at nifl.gov]
On Behalf Of SALandrum at aol.com
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 6:53 AM
To: assessment at nifl.gov
Subject: [Assessment 1926] Re: DIBELS

I may be wrong but I don't think it has been scaled for adults. Below is
from their webpage.

 

The DIBELS were developed as criterion-based measures; but national
norms have been developed. 

DIBELS are criterion-referenced because each measure has an empirically
established goal (or benchmark) that changes across time to ensure
students' skills are developing in a manner predictive of continued
progress. The goals/benchmarks were developed following a large group of
students in a longitudinal manner to see where students who were
"readers" in later grades were performing on these critical early
literacy skills when they were in Kindergarten and First grade so that
we can make predictions about which students are progressing adequately
and which students may need additional instructional support. This
approach is in contrast with normative measures which simply demonstrate
where a student is performing in relation to the normative sample,
regardless of whether that performance is predictive of future success. 

For your convenience, district-level norms or percentiles are generated
at each benchmark data collection period so schools/districts can make
decisions about student performance in relation to the local context of
students who have received, generally, the same type of instructional
experiences. National norms, generated with all the students in the
DIBELS Data System as of 2002, are also posted within the Technical
Reports section of the website in Technical Report #9. 

You can see how the benchmark goals are used by going to our Technical
Reports <https://dibels.uoregon.edu/techreports/index.php>  page and
downloading the following report: 

Good, R. H., Simmons, D. S., Kame'enui, E. J., Kaminski, R. A., &
Wallin, J. (2002). Summary of decision rules for intensive, strategic,
and benchmark instructional recommendations in kindergarten through
third grade (Technical Report No. 11). Eugene, OR: University of Oregon.


 

Susan Landrum
Certified Barton Tutor
Central Georgia Technical College
slandrumcgtcedu at gmail.com 

 

In a message dated 5/28/2009 6:42:03 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
jmarrapodi at applestar.org writes:

	I'm going out on a limb here.

	Lots of folks in the K-5 world use DIBELS
(https://dibels.uoregon.edu/ ) for reading assessment in the primary
grades. It is fairly granular. Is there any history or applicability for
use with adult low literacy learners? It's fairly intensive to learn to
administer, but it does measure a lot of the subskills we are looking at
with alphabetics, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. In the teacher
discussions on teachers.net one of their complaints was the timing
issues for young children, which I can see could create undue stress for
some tasks. Often elementary materials are problematic for adults, but
this one comes well researched.

	 

	I'm just wondering about it, so I thought I'd toss it into the
mix this week to see what you all thought.

	 

http://www.applestar.org/ <http://www.applestar.org/> 


Jean Marrapodi, PhD, CPLP

teacher by training, learner by design
jmarrapodi at applestar.org <mailto:rejoicer at aol.com> 
mobile: 401.440.6165
<http://www.plaxo.com/click_to_call?lang=en&src=jj_signature&To=401%2E44
0%2E6165&Email=rejoicer at aol.com> 
www.applestar.org <http://www.applestar.org/>  

 

	

	 

	 

	
	
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