The Truth About DIBELS: What It Is - What It Does. This item is unavailable.The Truth About DIBELS: What It Is - What It Does

DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards.
- P. David Pearson

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) is wildly popular up and down the local and state education hierarchies. It's easy, quick, and an approved Reading First assessment tool. So what's not to like?

Everything.

In The Truth About DIBELS you'll find out why teachers, administrators, and reading researchers nationwide are emphatically resisting the insidious influence of DIBELS. Well-known education writers - including P. David Pearson, Robert Tierney, Sandra Wilde, and Maryann Manning - tell you how DIBELS hurts students and teachers and why impairs learning and teaching. They present chapters that:

• dispel the science and methodology that "support" DIBELS
• critique the validity of the information that DIBELS spits out
• demonstrate how DIBELS warps instructional planning to fit its limited measurements - and to fit the political ends of its creators and supporters
• expose the fiction behind its supposedly miraculous success rates

If DIBELS is creeping into your classroom, school, district, or state - or if it's already taken over - read The Truth About DIBELS. Then use its accompanying CD, loaded with a complete anti-DIBELS PowerPoint presentation, to show colleagues, policy makers, or parents that when it comes to reading assessment, DIBELS just doesn't work.

Kenneth S. Goodman was Professor Emeritus, Language, Reading, and Culture, College of Education, University of Arizona, where he spent a long professional life observing the reading process in active use. From his earliest miscue research published in 1965 to the most recent presentation of his understanding of the reading process in 1997, he continued to fuel thought-provoking discussions of the nature of reading. His research earned him major awards from NCTE, IRA, NRC, and NCRLL. An elected member of the Reading Hall of Fame, Goodman is a past president of IRA, NCRLL, and the Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking.

P. David Pearson is coauthor of the Heinemann titles Comprehension Going Forward and What Every Teacher Should Need Know About Reading Comprehension Instruction.

He has served President of the National Reading Conference (NRC), Director of the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, and on the boards of directors for the International Reading Association, NRC, and Association of American Colleges of Teacher Education. He is the author of dozens of influential books and peer-reviewed articles, the founding editor of the Handbook of Reading Research, as well as a former editor of Reading Research Quarterly and the Review of Research in Education.

His many awards include the 1989 Oscar Causey Award (NRC) for contributions to reading research, the 1990 William S. Gray Citation of Merit (IRA) for contributions to reading research and practice, the 2005 Albert J. Harris Award (IRA) for the year's best reading-disability publication, and the 2003 Alan Purves Award (NCTE) for a publication impacting practice. In 2006 the University of honored him with the Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award, and in 2010 AERA gave him Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award.