Dibels vs. QRI-5

Although Dibels and the QRI-5 are both excelent tools for assessing students literacy capabilities they are also very different. Dibels works in 60 second intervals. The student is assessed on their aromaticity and fluency. Dibels assesses the 5 major areas of literacy; phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency, vocabulary and comprehension through a benchmark evaluation. The assessment can either be done on paper and pencil or through a hand help device such as a palm pilot. This allows for immediate results that can be available for the student, teacher, parent, school, district or even state. The program also allows the teacher to have access to intervention strategies and activities that will help improve areas of struggle. The students are marked as established, emergent or at risk. Since the Dibels is fast and effective it can be given to the entire class in a short amount of time. The QRI-5 is an individual administered informal reading innovatory designed to provide information about (1) the conditions under which students can identify words and comprehend text successfully and (2) conditions that appear to result in unsuccessful word identification or comprehension. The QRI-5 is broken down into different sections to evaluate the students level. to start off the student goes though a word list, then reads a passage and then finally retells the story and answers questions. Depending on how well they do the student would be assessed as frustration, instructional or independent. Both assessments are beneficial for the student but a main difference is the time constraint. Also while the QRI-5 isn't norm based, Dibels scoring is often compared to other students, including sometimes to the state. I feel that Dibels would be better for younger grades to evaluate sounds, letters and fluency but feel that the QRI-5 would have its greatest effects from grade 3 and up because i feel it evaluates comprehension better.