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Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills
What is unique about DIBELS?
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Educators need assessment tools that focus on the Big Ideas of
early literacy. Teaching and assessment are related but separate
processes. The Big Ideas should drive the instructional program, not
the assessment device. The DIBELS measures are an indicator of a
child's skill development in beginning reading, but are not
designed to assess every aspect of beginning reading.
For example, the Big Idea of phonological awareness has multiple
components: rhyming, syllable blending, phoneme manipulation,
etc. When beginning to teach phonological awareness (PA),
you would teach easier skills of PA before the more difficult
skills of phonological awareness
(click here
for more information on
How to Teach the Big Ideas of PA). The DIBELS measure of Phonemic
Segmentation Fluency (PSF) does not assess all aspects of PA; however, it
does provide an efficient and reliable indicator
of the child's skill
development of PA by assessing the development of a child's phonemic
segmentation skills.
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(Click button to play video.) |
Educators need assessment tools that respect valuable instructional
time. Each measure takes less than 3 minutes to administer and score
per child and allows educators a way to quickly determine how students
are responding to their instructional program.
For example, with 4 people trained on administering the measures, a class
of 25 children can be assessed on three big ideas in 30 minutes.
Educators need assessment tools that are instructionally relevant
and have empirically validated, objective goals. With any educational
goal, there are two parts: the criterion (how much) and the time period
(by when).
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How Much?
Each measure has an empirically validated score that
if students meet or achieve has been found to be predictive of later reading
proficiency. Conversely, students performing significantly below these goal
levels are at great risk for reading difficulties. Explicitly stated
goal levels help educators improve communication to
improve instructional planning.
By When?
It is not enough for students to simply meet a goal;
they must meet the goal by a specified time period so that they can make the
necessary progress they need to develop into lifelong readers. The example
box plot below
displays a school's first grade performance across the school year (fall,
winter, spring) on a measure of phonological awareness (PSF).
The goal for
the Phoneme Segmentation Fluency measure is to have all children at the
goal level (35 or more phonemes
per minute) by the end of Kindergarten. This is displayed in the graph by the
shaded area to the left of the September month. The box ends at this point
because we want all children to be proficient on this measure when they enter
first grade. When you look at this grade's performance it indicates that
the majority of students met the criterion of 35 or more on PSF; however,
they did not achieve this level until the end
of first grade. The goal for first
grade is to have all children reading; to achieve this goal though, students
should end kindergarten with established phonological awareness.
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(Click button to play video.) |
- Benchmark Goal Levels by Grade and Measure
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