Week 9 DIBELS Assignment 1& 2

Assignment #1

DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is a set of procedures and short measures to assess early literacy skills at the elementary level.  They are used to regularly monitor fluency development and early reading skills.  Fluency is not the only measures; it also measures phonemic awareness alphabetic principle, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and accuracy.   This assessment is designed to for early identification of reading difficulty.  DIBELS is only one type of assessment and can be used in combination with other reading assessment tools.

 

Assignment #2

 DIBELS has many parts and acronyms.  There categories at every level from kindergarten to sixth grade.  Kindergarten seems to have the most categories for assessing early literacy.  For example there is the ISF (Initial Sound Fluency).  The assess the student’s phonological awareness (the ability to recognize initial sounds of a word) and the LNF (Letter Naming Fluency) which tests the student’s recognition of upper and lower case letters.  At the kindergarten level there is also PSF (Phonemic Segmentation Fluency).   In this assessment, students have to segment three and four phoneme words into their individual phonemes.   At the first grade and other levels, students do not have the letter recognition, but the levels have ORF (Oral Reading Fluency) and RTF (Retelling Fluency).  The higher grades (5^th and 6^th) only have ORF and RTF assessments.  More assessments are done in the early grade to identification reading difficulties quickly.

 

From what I have read so far, DIBELS is used to assess students at the beginning, middle, and end of the year.  They are quick assessments individual; however, they seem to be time consuming when a teacher needs to perform all the assessments at the different points throughout the year, especially if the have a class of 20 students.