Nonsense Word Fluency

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Description of Measure

The DIBELS Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) measure is a standardized, individually administered test of the alphabetic principle - including letter-sound correspondence and of the ability to blend letters into words in which letters represent their most common sounds (Kaminski & Good, 1996). The student is presented an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper with randomly ordered VC and CVC nonsense words (e.g., sig, rav, ov) and asked to produce verbally the individual letter sound of each letter or verbally produce, or read, the whole nonsense word. For example, if the stimulus word is "vaj" the student could say /v/ /a/ /j/ or say the word /vaj/ to obtain a total of three letter-sounds correct. The student is allowed 1 minute to produce as many letter-sounds as he/she can, and the final score is the number of letter-sounds produced correctly in one minute. Because the measure is fluency based, students receive a higher score if they are phonologically recoding the word and receive a lower score if they are providing letter sounds in isolation. The NWF measure also takes about 2 minutes to administer and has over 20 alternate forms for monitoring progress.

NWF is a measure that assess alphabetic principle skills. The alphabetic principle is composed of two parts: Alphabetic Understanding: Words are composed of letters that represent sounds. Phonological Recoding: Using systematic relationships between letters and phonemes (letter-sound correspondence) to retrieve the pronunciation of an unknown printed string or to spell words. To learn more about the alphabetic principle, please visit the Big Ideas in Beginning Reading Alphabetic Principle pages.

Recommended Administration Periods

Nonsense Word Fluency is given in Winter (optional) and Spring of Kindergarten, and Fall, Winter, and Spring of First Grade.

Technical Adequacy Information

The one-month, alternate-form reliability for NWF in January of first grade is .83 (Good et al., in preparation). The concurrent criterion-validity of DIBELS NWF with the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised Readiness Cluster score is .36 in January and .59 in February of first grade (Good et al., in preparation). The predictive validity of DIBELS NWF in January of first grade with (a) CBM ORF in May of first grade is .82, (b) CBM ORF in May of second grade is .60, (c) Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery Total Reading Cluster score is .66 (Good et al., in preparation).

Resource Links

The following resources are available for this measure:

	DIBELS Administration and Scoring Guide: For complete administration and scoring with more examples than are available in the tutorial.
	Online Tutorial: For administration and scoring directions online with video and audio clips.
	Benchmark Booklets: For the complete set of DIBELS measures administered across a school year.
	Progress monitoring / alternate forms: For a complete booklet of all 20 alternate forms of the measure for regular progress monitoring.
	Big Ideas in Beginning Reading: Learn more about the alphabetic principle.

This research is supported, in part, by the Early Childhood Research Institute on Measuring Growth and Development (H180M10006) funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Special Education Programs.