Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills

What are Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)?

Which skills do the DIBELS measures assess?

• The DIBELS measures were specifically designed to assess 3 of the 5 Big Ideas of early literacy: Phonological Awareness, Alphabetic Principle, and Fluency with Connected Text (click here to link to Big Ideas in Beginning Reading for more information on each of these domains). The measures are linked to one another, both psychometrically and theoretically, and have been found to be predictive of later reading proficiency.
  
  
• Measures of Phonological Awareness:
  • Initial Sounds Fluency (ISF): Assesses a child's skill to identify and produce the initial sound of a given word (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the ISF measure).
  • Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF): Assesses a child's skill to produce the individual sounds within a given word (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the PSF measure).
  
  
• Measure of Alphabetic Principle:
  • Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF): Assesses a child's knowledge of letter-sound correspondences as well their ability to blend letters together to form unfamiliar "nonsense" (e.g., fik, lig, etc.) words (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the NWF measure).
  
  
• Measure of Fluency with Connected Text:
  • Oral Reading Fluency (ORF): Assesses a child's skill of reading connected text in grade-level material word (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the ORF measure).

These measures link together to form an assessment system of early literacy development depicted in the following figure that allows educators to readily and reliably determine student progress.

(Click button to play video.)

What might an established reader look like?

The most researched, efficient and standardized measure of reading proficiency is Oral Reading Fluency. It is the culminating measure of the DIBELS assessment system. The ORF measure has students read an unfamiliar passage of grade-level material for one minute. The final score is the number of words read correctly in that minute. With this robust measure, we can readily determine how a student's reading development is progressing and whether that student is on the path to becoming a proficient and fluent reader.

(Click button to play video.)

The example student reader is an end-of-year first grader that is reading at a level that we would call an established first grade reader (i.e., reading over 40 words correct per minute). While he isn't a perfect reader, if he were the lowest performing reader in a first grade classroom, his performance would indicate that the reading program being used in the classroom is meeting the needs of all the students because it is getting each student to a level of reading proficiency that is predictive of later reading success.