Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)

Description

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are seven standardized, brief, repeatable, [Page 1277]fluency-based measures of early literacy skills. This set of measures is built on Curriculum-Based Measurement—Reading and represents a behavioral assessment approach to testing academic skills. Each measure takes approximately 1 minute to administer and has many equivalent alternate forms to facilitate repeated assessments over time. Through a program of longitudinal research conducted at the University of Oregon, a sequence of benchmark goals that indicate adequate progress toward successful reading outcomes has been established.

An essential feature of the DIBELS assessment system is the correspondence of the measures to the core components of early literacy, as identified by the National Reading Panel. The Initial Sound Fluency (ISF) and Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) measures assess the phonemic awareness core component by asking the student to identify the first sound (ISF) and all sounds (PSF) of common words presented orally by the examiner. The Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) measure corresponds to the alphabetic principle core component by asking students to read consonant-vowel (CV) and consonant-vowelconsonant (CVC) nonsense words. The DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF) measure assesses accuracy and fluency with connected text by asking students to read a short passage aloud for 1 minute. The optional Retell Fluency (RF) assessment strengthens the DIBELS assessment of reading comprehension by asking students to tell all about what they read in the DORF assessment. The optional Word Use Fluency (WUF) measure provides an assessment of vocabulary and expressive language competence by asking students to use a sequence of common and uncommon words representing different parts of speech in a phrase or sentence. The Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) measure provides an indicator of risk and does not correspond directly to one of the core components of early literacy.

The DIBELS measures were developed primarily to monitor and evaluate progress toward early literacy goals. For progress monitoring, a selected DIBELS measure would be administered 1 to 4 times per month, depending on the skills and risk status of the student. The repeated assessments are graphed, and a decision rule is utilized to determine when the student is making adequate progress toward the benchmark goal or needs increased instructional support. In addition to progress monitoring, the DIBELS meet screening and outcome assessment purposes and provide substantial diagnostic information. As a screening measure, 2 to 4 DIBELS measures provide a brief and efficient assessment at the beginning or middle of the year to identify students who may need additional intervention. At the end of the year, the percent of students achieving the corresponding DIBELS benchmark goals provides a vivid and meaningful outcome assessment. While the DIBELS are not intended to provide an exhaustive diagnostic assessment, they do provide information that can be used to guide instruction, including targeting the specific core component of early literacy where a student needs instructional support and indicating the level of support he or she is likely to need to achieve benchmark goals. However, DIBELS users should be prepared to augment DIBELS with more comprehensive assessment if additional diagnostic information is needed to guide instruction.

...