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

What might an established reader look like?

The most researched, efficient and standardized measure of reading proficiency is Oral Reading Fluency. It is the culminating measure of the DIBELS assessment system. The ORF measure has students read an unfamiliar passage of grade-level material for one minute. The final score is the number of words read correctly in that minute. With this robust measure, we can readily determine how a student's reading development is progressing and whether that student is on the path to becoming a proficient and fluent reader.

Oral Reading Fluency measure administered to an end-of-year first grader. (Click button to play video.)

The example student reader is an end-of-year first grader that is reading at a level that we would call an established first grade reader (i.e., reading over 40 words correct per minute). While he isn't a perfect reader, if he were the lowest performing reader in a first grade classroom, his performance would indicate that the reading program being used in the classroom is meeting the needs of all the students because it is getting each student to a level of reading proficiency that is predictive of later reading success.