Disheartening: Teaching Children What They Already Know

At Boston College students in our teacher education Masters program must complete an “inquiry project” in their practicum classrooms. To celebrate this achievement, each year Boston College hosts a “community of learners” mini-conference where students share their projects.

This year I sat at a table with seven students who shared their projects with me and with each other. I must say, it was a pretty disheartening experience. Our program at BC emphasizes teaching reading in the context of rich, challenging literature; yet all these students shared projects that focused on decontextualized phonics and sight word instruction. We may stress holistic approaches to reading at BC, but in their classrooms the emphasis was on skills, skills, and more skills. It was particularly discouraging to hear a student named Anne (who had been in one of my classes) rave about a new phonics program her (suburban) school had adopted. All students in grades K-2 now spend 30 minutes a day on phonics and, according to Anne, next year the program will be extended to 3rd grade.

Research indicates that lots of kids enter first grade with strong phonics skills and many of these children already read independently. This may be particularly true in affluent, suburban schools like Anne’s. Putting aside my objection to decontextualized phonics instruction, why are the teachers in Anne’s school – and in other schools across the country – teaching so many children what they already know? Why would we force potentially hundreds of hours of phonics instruction (in Anne’s school children will have had over 350 hours of phonics instruction by the time they complete 3rd grade) on children who already read independently? The only answer I can come up with is this. Many schools have stopped asking how well children read and instead ask: “How do they do on DIBELS?”

No wonder David Pearson has warned that “DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flashcards” (p. v).

The Trouble with DIBELS

I’ve been grading my students’ research papers the last few days and I’ve been surprised how many students made some reference to the use of DIBELS in their schools. What particularly surprised me was the fact that some of these students taught in affluent, high-achieving schools. I had assumed that DIBELS was mainly used in underachieving, Reading First schools. It seems that I was wrong.

In the forward to Ken Goodman’s book, The Truth About DIBELS: What It Is - What It Does, David Pearson warns that “DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flashcards” (p. v). Pearson takes this strong stance because, in his opinion, “DIBELS shapes instruction in ways that are bad for students” and “bad for teachers.” Pearson believes that DIBELS is bad for students because it shapes instruction in ways that do not promote students’ development as readers and bad for teaches because it requires that teachers shape instruction “based on criteria that are not consistent with our best knowledge about the nature of reading development” (p. v).

Perhaps the most widely used – and troubling – DIBELS measure is Oral Reading Fluency which produces a measure of students’ reading speed and accuracy (number of words read correctly per minute). What’s troubling is the behavioral theory of reading that underpins this measure. DIBELS is informed by a developmental model of reading that assumes learning to read is a matter of learning to sound out letters and words to a level of “automaticity” and, once children read with sufficient fluency (speed and accuracy), they will be able to comprehend what they’ve read.

The theory of reading underpinning DIBELS predicts that fluent readers should be good comprehenders and, conversely, students who are not fluent (do not read with sufficient speed and accuracy) should be poor comprehenders. In their book, Rereading Fluency: Process, Practice, and Policy, Bess Altwerger, Nancy Jordan, and Nancy Rankie Shelton report a study they conducted that, among other things, examines the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension. What they found was that some of the best comprehenders read slowly. Similarly, some of the most fluent readers (those who read the most words correctly in one minute) were among the poorest comprehenders.

Altwerger, Jordan, and Shelton’s research challenges the basic theoretical assumptions underlying DIBELS. Their research also reinforces the argument that “scientifically-based research” isn’t just about sound methods. It is also about sound theory and the theory of reading on which DIBELS is based is fundamentally flawed.