Running head: STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT

Student Assessment Project

Stevie Morga

EDU 325
STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 1

Student Assessment Project

The student chosen for this assessment project, for the purposes of keeping privacy, will

be called Sally. Sally is a first-grade student at an urban city school. Sally is seven years old and

academically performs at a slightly below average level. She requires much attention from the

teacher to remind her to focus on the task in front of her. During times when Sally is removed

from distracting areas, she is able to perform better however she constantly requires redirection

towards the lesson. Sally has attention deficit hyperactive disorder, the inattentive type. For this

reason, the assessment was given in a separate classroom where there could be minimal

distractions for Sally. While the social distractions were removed, there were still objects in the

room that caught Sally’s attention and therefore, caused a distraction in the Dynamic Indicators

of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Next assessment.

Procedures

Upon first meeting Sally it was important to build a relationship to ensure there would be

no barriers during the assessment. This is especially important during the story recall sections.

For this reason, when I first met Sally we sat and discussed things she likes, her day, and I took

time to introduce myself. This allowed me to build a relationship with Sally around adults that

she trusted. Sally’s parents were not present during the time I first met her. Instead, Sally and I

first met with her general education classroom teacher and the student teacher in her classroom.

After meeting Sally the first time, she was told I would return later to do a reading assessment

with her. I returned the next day to give Sally her DIBLES Next assessment. Due to the fact that

Sally has ADHD inattentive type, her general education teacher suggested she take the

assessment in an empty resource room to allow minimum distractions. Sally and I sat at a table. I

explained to her that I wanted her to show me how well she reads. I encouraged her to read as
STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 2

much as she could and do her very best reading. This established an encouraging environment

for her. Sally tends to struggle in reading comprehension in her general education classroom.

Therefore, I predicted that her oral reading fluency recall would be the most difficult section for

her to complete. As I will address later, I was correct in my prediction.

Assessments Given

The DIBLES Next assessment given to Sally was the Grade 1 Benchmark Assessment.

Sally was given four different probes. These probes were letter naming fluency, phoneme

segmentation fluency, nonsense word fluency, and DIBLES oral reading fluency. The letter

naming fluency was given first and was only given one time. The letter naming fluency probe

assesses how fluently students are able to identify and name both capitol and lowercase letters

(Good, Kaminski, Cummings, Dufour-Martel, Petersen, Powell-Smith, Stollar & Wallin, 2012).

This is important to help teachers understand each student’s automaticity of letter naming (Good,

et al, 2012). The second probe given was phoneme segmentation fluency. This probe tests how

well a student is able to correctly identified individual phonemes (Smolkowski & Cummings,

2016). Next, Sally was assessed on her nonsense word fluency. This probe is designed to monitor

the aqusition and development of decoding skills (Fien, Park, Baker, Smith, Stoolmiller,

Kame’enui, 2010). The final probe given in the grade 1 benchmark assessment is the DIBELS

oral reading fluency. This probe is important because it is a strong predictor of how well students

will perform on standardized reading tests due to the intense instruction and monitoring that the

DIBELS oral reading fluency can assist with (Paleologos, & Brabham 2011). These are the

probes in order that they were given as well as their significance.

Results & Analysis

STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 3

Figure 1: Sally vs Benchmark

45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

0
LNF PSF NWF CLS NWF WWR DORF

Sally Benchmark

Figure 1 show scores that Sally received on each test compared to the Benchmarks for DIBELS Next. Letter Naming Fluency

(LNF) does not have a Benchmark score because DIBELS NEXT does not provide one.

Letter Naming Fluency The first assessment given was the letter naming fluency (LNF)

probe. This probe does not have a benchmark score because it is an indicator of risk, not a skill

in and of itself which should be assessed. Letter naming fluency is something that teachers

should monitor in the early grades because it will affect student understanding of reading,

however it does not have a benchmark goal as the other probes do. This probe is given in one-

minute. Sally could name 37 out of 40 letters named accurately. This is a 92.5% accuracy rate.

Sally is showing a high success rate for letter naming fluency.

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency The second assessment given was the phoneme

segmentation fluency (PSF) probe. The benchmark for first grade at the beginning of the year is

40 correct sounds named. Sally successfully segmented 9 words given to her. This was a difficult

task for Sally because she was continuously getting distracted and forgot directions multiple

times. She often took time to repeat sounds she had already named because she had lost her place
STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 4

and had to begin again. This inattentive behavior is due to Sally’s attention deficit hyperactive

disorder. This is a success rate of 22.5% which is far below benchmark.

Nonsense Word Fluency The third assessment given was the nonsense word fluency

(NWF) probe. There are three benchmarks given for this probe because in the first grade it is

given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. At the beginning of the year the benchmark

is 27 correct letter sounds and 1 whole word read. Since Sally was only met with one time, she

will only be scored in comparison to the beginning of the school year. Sally read 21 correct letter

sounds and 5 whole words read. This is a 77% success rate for correct letter sounds and an above

benchmark success rate for whole words read.

DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency The final assessment given was the DIBELS oral

reading fluency (DORF) probe. Like nonsense word fluency, there are multiple benchmarks

given for this probe. The probe is given in the middle and at the end of the first grade. However

again Sally’s scores will only be compared to the middle of the year benchmarks. The

benchmark for the middle of the year should read at 23 words correct and a 78% accuracy. Sally

read an average of 13 words correct and had 65% accuracy. These scores indicate below

benchmark level. Sally also had an average retell score of 7 with a quality score of 1. This

indicates that while she is a fluent reader, she lacks reading comprehension skills.

Areas Targeted for Improvement

Targeted Area A The first area that should be addressed is the phoneme segmentation

fluency. This area was targeted because it seemed that Sally could read blends and specific

words but could not segment out the fluency. Attention should be drawn to this because it

indicates rote memorization of blends rather than an understanding of individual phonemes.

STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 5

According to Julia M. Carroll (2004), learning letters is what helps students understand the

individual phonemes. This therefore should be a precursor to learning phoneme segmentation. It

is important that the teacher reassesses Sally’s understanding of the individual letters. It is also

possible that the student is not thinking about what the blends look like, but instead using the

first sound she sees to identify the blend. Therefore relying only on the auditory and not the

visual (Sato, Tremblay & Gracco, 2009). This is the first targeted areas and two strategies to

focus on.

Targeted Area B The second area that should be addressed is the retell section of the

DIBELS oral reading fluency probe. Sally showed clearly that she was able to read fluently when

since she was very close to benchmark accuracy and words correctly read. However, her retell

quality score was consistently a 1 because she provided one or two details about what she had

read no matter the amount of words read. One useful strategy used to improve retell is the

teacher modeling a think-aloud. The think-aloud strategy improves deep thought, awareness, and

comprehension of the text (Sonmez & Sulak, 2018). Another strategy is the Lexical inferencing

strategy (Juliana, 2017). This is a way for students to infer any un familiar text they may come

across (Juliana, 2017). The reason this might be helpful is because since Sally was encouraged to

simply get through the text she might misunderstand some of the information she read. Through

inferencing, Sally can take the information she already has and guess any missing information.

Conclusion

Overall the curriculum based measure, DIBELS, showed that Sally did significantly

better than I had anticipated despite her attention deficit hyperactive disorder inattentive type. It

was helpful to be in a separate room from the rest of the class. In the end, Sally’s scores were to

be expected. Sally performs in her general education at a below average level in her reading. She
STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 6

likewise performed below average on all of her DIBELS Next assessments. Two aspects that

were found to be important in moving forward were that Sally needed a Tier III environment to

lessen distraction and that it would be wise to work more on Sally’s reading comprehension

skills. The only surprising scores were the phoneme segmentation fluency and the retell portion

of the DIBELS oral reading fluency. The DIBELS Next probes gave much insight into where

Sally currently was and how to progress from there.

STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 7

Bibliography

Good, R., Kaminski, R., Cummings, K., Dufour-Martel, C., Petersen, K., Powell-Smith, K.,

Stollar, S., & Wallin, J. (2012). Dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills. DIBELS

Next Assessment Manual.

Smolkowski, K. & Cummings, K. (2016). Evaluation of the dibels (sixth edition) diagnostics

system for the selection of native and proficient English speakers at risk of reading

difficulties. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 34(2), 103-118.

Fien, H., Park, Y., Baker, S., Smith, J., Stoolmiller, M. & Kame’enui, E. (2010). An examination

of the relation of nonsense word fluency initial status and gains to reading outcomes for

beginning readers. School Psychology Review, 39(4), 631-653.

Paleologos, T. & Brabham, E. (2011). The effectiveness of dibels oral reading fluency for

predicting reading comprehension of high- and low-income students. Reading

Psychology, 32, 54-74.

Carroll, J. (2004). Letter knowledge precipitates phoneme segmentation, but not phoneme

invariance. Journal of Research in Reading, 27(3), 212-225.

Sato, M., Tremblay, P. & Gracco, V. (2009). A mediating role of the premotor cortex in

phoneme segmentation. Brain & Language, 1-7.

Sonmez, Y. & Sulak, S. (2018). The effect of the thinking-aloud strategy on the reading

comprehension skills of 4th grade primary school students. Universal Journal of

Educational Research, 6(1), 168-172.

STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 8

Juliana. (2017). The comparative impacts of using lexical glossing and inferencing strategies on

students’ reading comprehension. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 9(1).