ASSIGNMENT 3 Compare and Contrast QRI5 and DIBELS

QRI 5 and DIBELS share many similarities and differences and both are powerful assessment and instructional tools for early childhood educators in and outside of the classroom.  QRI5 and DIBELS both assess literacy skills and reading development and are research and standards based.  QRI5 can be used with elementary through high school aged students and DIBELS can be used with kindergarten through 6th grade students.  Both assessment tools are designed to be administered individually and provide explicit instructions for how to administer and score the assessments.  Teacher and student materials are always provided to make the assessment consistent and valid.

QRI 5 and DIBELS are different.  QRI 5 is a reading inventory.  It is mostly focused on reading and on helping educators identify students’ reading levels (individual, instructional, and frustration) for the purposes of determining student performance compared to grade level standards, and to plan for effective instruction.  QRI 5 also provides teachers with some information about student literacy development in particular areas of reading through a miscue analysis, and comprehension assessment.  It definitely provides comprehensive information about student reading fluency and comprehension.  In fact, these are key factors in determining a student’s reading level with the QRI 5.  The QRI 5 also uses word lists to assess student word identification in and out of context.  Another feature that makes QRI 5 unique is its use of both narrative and expository text to assess readers.

DIBELS is a set of assessments/measures broken down into big ideas in reading, rather than one big assessment under the umbrella of reading.  Like QRI 5, DIBELS assesses student reading fluency and comprehension, but in a much faster manner, and in a way that feels less like authentic reading than QRI 5 does.  However, DIBELS measures student performance in a variety of phonological and phonemic awareness areas that the QRI 5 does not, such as the First Sound Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency measures.  The purpose of DIBELS is not only to identify student reading levels, but also to detect possible learning issues and intervene if/when necessary.  DIBELS is also much faster and efficient than QRI 5.  The one-minute measures look and feel different than the reading passages and discussions that happen with QRI 5.  

It is easy to see how DIBELS and QRI 5 complement one another and overlap.  To me QRI 5 feels like a reading assessment and DIBELS feels like a reading skills assessment.  As a teacher, I think both are important.  However, I do think that the later is of particular importance with children who struggle because they need us to be able to pinpoint areas of difficulty and intervene there.  DIBELS makes this possible.  In an age when accountability and data driven instruction are at the forefront, having tools like QRI 5 and DIBELS is important as they provide you with different, yet equally important, sources of information about student literacy development over time.