Russ on Reading: What Is the Best Way to Assess Early Literacy?

Russ on Reading: What Is the Best Way to Assess Early Literacy?:

What Is the Best Way to Assess Early Literacy?

Recently a teacher wrote to me about her school district's plans to scrap Running Records and use a combination of DIBELS and AIMSweb for assessing early literacy abilities. She asked for my help in fighting this ill-advised policy move and I provided some research based resources. I am pleased to say that this teacher, through her informed and impassioned action, was able to prevail and the elimination of Running Records was shelved.

This incident got me thinking and I decided to write this post to clarify some issues on early literacy assessment. As I travel to schools around the country, I have noted the proliferation of DIBELS and AIMSweb. Both DIBELS and AIMSweb are called "curriculum based measures" or CBMs. This term sounds good, of course, and may help administrators sell the product to school boards, but as literacy assessment expert, Peter Johnston points out, neither of these measures is curriculum based, unless we consider counting correctly pronounced words in a one-minute reading a part of the curriculum.

I would like to compare these assessments of early literacy to two assessments that I think are more enlightened and effective: Running Records and The Observational Survey, both devised by literacy researcher/educator Marie Clay.

Both DIBELS and AIMSweb take a "bits and pieces" approach to early literacy assessment. Children are asked to identify the letters of the alphabet, to read nonsense words, to segment the sounds in words, to perform a timed reading for fluency, and to use given vocabulary in a sentence all under Russ on Reading: What Is the Best Way to Assess Early Literacy?: