DIBELS or Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills is a group of assessments used to evaluate students in the area of reading or reading readiness. Three of the five Big Ideas in Reading are assessed: Phonological Awareness, Alphabetic Principle, and Fluency with Connected Text. These measures are linked to one another and have been found to predict  later proficiency in reading. DIBELS is administered at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. If students do not meet benchmarks in an areas of early literacy, then more frequent progress monitoring will occur. Different literacy skills are assessed in grades kindergarten through second grade:

Kindergarten:  Initial Sound Fluency(ISF), Letter Naming Fluency(LNF), Nonsense Word Fluency(NWF), and Phoneme Segmentation Fluency(PSF) are evaluated. Initial Sound fluency assesses how quickly a student can identify beginning sounds of words either orally or from pictures. Students are asked to name a list of letters as rapidly as they can in the Letter Naming assessment. The sounds of letters must be articulated when students read a make believe word like juv in the Nonsense Word Fluency assessment. Phoneme Segmentation Fluency assess how quickly and accurately a student can say all the sounds in a word i.e. c-a-t.

First Grade:  Letter Naming Fluency(LNF), Phoneme Segmentation Fluency(PSF), Nonsense Word Fluency(NWF), and Oral Reading Fluency(ORF) are assessed. The Oral Reading Fluency  measure has students read an unfamiliar passage of grade level material for one minute. This assessment determines how a student's reading development is progressing.

Second Grade:  Nonsense Word Fluency(NWF) and Oral Reading Fluency(ORF) is assessed. The Oral Reading Fluency  measure has students read an unfamiliar passage of grade level material for one minute. This assessment determines how a student's reading development is progressing.

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About DIBELS