There is much disagreement in our district about the use of running records for progress monitoring. I'm wondering if other districts have gone through this, how they've resolved it, and what they are currently using for universal screening and progress monitoring. Thank you in advance.

We typically use DIBELS for our school-wide screenings as well as for our progress monitoring.

We have the same questions and are facing two issues; those being reliable assessments and generalizability of results. We use DIBELS but often find odd variations in scores from one administration to the next. We can't figure out how to get the SEM to see if change did take place or if changes are due to error. And, when we do believe that progress has been made, it's rarely seen in classroom performance. All this seriously impairs our interpretations. While I don't have data to back this up, I feel that we often intiate and terminate interventions based on bad data. And, teachers are becoming very frustrated because these "test" results are outweighing their insights.

Running records have similar drawbacks, but are much more closely tied to the curriculum that the teachers are using. Just by experience, we (teachers and psychologists) find much better generalizability of results with running records. That is, when teachers "see" progress with running records they "see" better classroom performances.

I'm not sure about this, but I'll suggest something for discussion's sake. Running Records may be a better predictor of classroom performance than CBM measures like the DIBELS, particularly if classroom reading activities closely resemble what's expected when doing a RR. Perhaps, though, a CBM measure has other advantages. It's probably a more practical screening instrument. It's also probably better suited to progress monitoring. It may even be a better indicator of the extent to which important foundation skills are developing. I see RR's and CBM as very different measures, and contributing different sorts of information about reading growth.

We use Early Literacy (LNF, LSF, PSF, NWF) and R-CBM through AIMSweb - very similar to DIBELS - for our Benchmark Assessments in Grades K & 1 and for progress monitoring for students in the need of intervention. We also use the progress monitoring probes in special education for students with an oral reading fluency goal.

Since the probes are standardized, it is a different type of measurement as opposed to running records. I agree with the response from CGranger.

Our reg. ed. students have running records as a part of their benchmark assessments, but they are given at different times than the AIMSweb assessments - sometimes weeks apart.

Interesting conversation. I would suggest that resolving the running record (RR) issue in your district will have a lot to do with the use of the assessment. A good question to ask is why you want to do an assessment and how the data will be used afterwards. I tend to see this as CGranger does--that each type of assessment has its own advantages and disadvantages.
In an RtI system, at least at Tier III (not sure on Tier II and Stadnard Protocols), we want to closely align intervention to student need. A CBM may give you some useful information for this alignment, but look at this sentence from Tilley's Blog about Tier III on another section of this web site:

"...we’ll do assessments looking at things like word reading, phonics, oral language vocabulary, monitoring meaning while reading, making inferences, literal understanding and the list goes on."

Aren't those the types of skills that RRs can ascertain? If so, I think Reading Specialists just need to understand how important their assessment skills will be in an RtI approach.

Hope this helps.