DIBELS

This is my fourth year there.

Prior to coming there, I worked for Roland Good and Ruth Kaminski, the original authors of DIBELS, for 17 years at a company they had here in Eugene, Oregon, now called Acadience Learning.

And prior to that, I worked at the University of South Florida in the school psych and applied behavior analysis programs, and that provided me with an opportunity to work with the Florida Center for Reading Research under Joe Torgesen at that time.

And going way back, which connects to this work, which is why I mention it, I earned my doctorate at the University of Oregon and had the opportunity to learn from some prominent scholars in the area of direct instruction, such as Wes Becker and Doug Carnine and Ed Kame'enui.

I'm not talking about people being diagnosed.

I'm talking about people being sent to special education services in the school when they're assessed using DIBELS, using a curriculum.

But Pardac comes

with a diagnosis, though, usually.

So what I did was I looked at the beginning of the year screener.

We used DIBELS, and if you're familiar with DIBELS, it color codes students red, yellow, green, and blue, and those were my groups.

So the biggest mistake I made here was using just the one data piece, um, without using an additional data piece or without using an extra layer to actually pinpoint what my students needed.

You know, I could have like a group of reds in one group or, and I have a group of yellow, but there could have been overlap in the actual gaps that they had.

We do have the ability for you to upload assessment, um, parameters.

So if you have a DIBELS assessment, for example, or a district benchmark, you can upload those, um, parameters with the scoring, uh, rubric in the system, and then all of your staff can document according to that.

You can also do freeform, add as you wish.

Um, but there's another question about that was, "Does the program have checklists to choose assessments that best describe the students, or do you always have the need to write narratives describing the performance?" Within Brolly, we have the ability to-- you have the ability to build out a template so that you don't always have to write out, um, various narratives.

Screeners can really help with this.

That beginning of the year screener, such as DIBELS, can really help with this.

But we want to add in an additional layer of assessment.

That additional layer of support is really going to help us pinpoint that and answer that big question, what is preventing this student from becoming successful? So here's an example.

I don't think he was dyslexic, I just think he just had bad instruction.

And in one semester, you know, he started off the school year, when they assessed him, they use DIBELS.

In DIBELAs you get a score of, like, red, which means you're way below grade level, yellow, which means you're in danger, green-

Uh-huh

Yeah

... you know, oral reading fluency, DIBELS, uh, you know, a- Acadience, whatever it is.

They've heard about it, and they may use it, but people are as skeptical as I was about the value of it.

And I get it.