What are the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills or DIBELS?

Which skills do the DIBELS measures assess?

• The DIBELS measures were specifically designed to assess 3 of the 5 Big Ideas of early literacy: Phonological Awareness, Alphabetic Principle, and Fluency with Connected Text. The measures are linked to one another, both psychometrically and theoretically, and have been found to be predictive of later reading proficiency.
  
  
• Measures of Phonological Awareness:
  • Initial Sounds Fluency (ISF): Assesses a child's skill to identify and produce the initial sound of a given word (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the ISF measure).
  • Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF): Assesses a child's skill to produce the individual sounds within a given word (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the PSF measure).
  
  
• Measure of Alphabetic Principle:
  • Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF): Assesses a child's knowledge of letter-sound correspondences as well their ability to blend letters together to form unfamiliar "nonsense" (e.g., fik, lig, etc.) words (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the NWF measure).
  
  
• Measure of Fluency with Connected Text:
  • Oral Reading Fluency (ORF): Assesses a child's skill of reading connected text in grade-level material (click here for a longer description and to learn how to administer and score the ORF measure).

These measures link together to form an assessment system of early literacy development depicted in the following figure that allows educators to readily and reliably determine student progress.

Dr. Roland Good discusses steppingstones to literacy. (Click button to play video.)