QRI-5 and DIBELS

QRI-5 is an informal literacy assessment that is used to measure a variety of different literacy skills including fluency, automaticity, word identification, and comprehension.  These assessments can be used for students pre-primer through high school.  QRI-5 can be used to assess student strengths and weakness, to pinpoint precise reading behavior or habits, to assess student growth over a period of time, and to help teachers create student specific lessons for both whole class as well as for small group interventions.
I found these assessments to be extremely useful as well as clearly described.  The assessment process can take a lot of time, but it really gives the teacher a good idea of where the student is with their literacy growth.  Having the chance to work with the student one on one and witnessing their reading behaviors can be a useful tool in finding the next logical step for improvement.
DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is an assessment for students kindergarten through sixth grade.  The assessment is used to measure initial sound fluency (ISF), letter naming fluency (LNF), phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), nonsense word fluency (NWF), word use fluency (WUF), and oral reading fluency with retelling fluency (ORF).  A student is asked a series of questions according to which skill is to be assessed, and the teacher uses either a palm pilot or ipod touch with the DIBELS program to record student answers and the time in which it took them to answer the questions.  Everything is timed in order to assess the automaticity and fluency within all of these categories.
I really enjoyed trying out this program for future reference.  I liked how student progress was charted throughout their assessed history and how the program gives helpful suggestions when students are lagging behind.  On the other hand, I did not like using the palm pilot because sometimes it would not register when I would tap a response or a button.  It became fairly annoying.  Perhaps using the ipod touch would have been less frustrating.  Even with this snag, I understood the idea behind this assessment and I would use both of these assessments in my own classroom.  I think a classroom shouldn't have one of these assessments without the other only because I feel that DIBELS could assess fluency more quickly and record student history.  This would allow the teacher to do this more often if needed.  The QRI-5 assesses comprehension and retelling skills in a more in depth manner than the DIBELS.  Both assessments are important to accurately assess student learning and to help guide their literacy learning.