Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills

Why use DIBELS?

Teaching with the odds in your favor.

Because the DIBELS measures have been used so extensively in schools and with real children, we have data indicating the relation between the measures. As stepping stones to literacy development, it means that performance on one of the DIBELS measures is predictive of performance on the next appropriate DIBELS measure(s). To demonstrate the predictive nature of the measures, let's look at two different scatterplots demonstrating the relation of kindergarten phonological awareness and first grade alphabetic principle on end-of-first-grade reading proficiency.

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This scatterplot displays all first grade students in a school using their Kindergarten May phonological awareness performance (measured by PSF) with their end-of-first-grade fluency with connected text performance (measured by ORF). Each dot represents an individual student. If you track down from a dot, you will get that student's end of Kindergarten performance on the PSF measure (horizontal axis). If you track over to the vertical axis, using the same student, you will get that child's end of first grade ORF score. The green lines within the plot depict the benchmark goal levels for each measure. In this example, the green vertical line is at 35 because that is the goal level for all children to be at or above by the end of kindergarten. Any child to the right of the green vertical line met the end of kindergarten goal on phonological awareness. The green horizontal line is at 40 because that is the goal level for all children to be at or above on the ORF measure by the end of first grade. Any child above the green horizontal line has met the end-of-year ORF goal. The red line depicts the scores that are predictive of later reading difficulty. Children to the left of the red vertical line had a score of less than 10 on the PSF measure and are at serious risk for reading difficulties without a change in instructional program. Students below the red horizontal line had a score of less than 10 on ORF at the end of first grade and are considered to be a non-readers.

While the relation between the PSF and ORF measures is not perfect, it is accurate at predicting performance at the ends of the continuum. For example, for the students finishing Kindergarten established on phonological awareness, 84 percent of them were established readers by the end of first grade. This means that the odds are in the child's favor of being a reader in first grade if they have established PA in kindergarten. Conversely, the odds are stacked against students finishing kindergarten with a score of 10 or less on PSF. Only 16 percent of those students were established readers at the end of first grade. The table below has the scores of one classroom of first graders from the scatterplot example. One column has the end-of-Kindergarten PSF performance and the right hand column has that same student's end-of-first-grade ORF performance. You can use these scores to put a name to the dots in the grade-level scatterplot. In this classroom, of the 5 children finishing kindergarten with a score of less than 10 on PSF, only 1 was an established reader at the end of first grade. For the 7 students finishing kindergarten with established PA, six were established readers at the end of first grade.

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While not perfectly predictive, first grade teachers can use students' kindergarten performance to identify students who will most likely require more intensive instruction at the beginning of first grade to prevent the likelihood of being a nonreader at the end of first grade. This scatterplot also demonstrates how much kindergarten instruction impacts later reading performance.

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