DIBELS (What the heck is that?!)

DIBELS is an acronym for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. According to their website,

"The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of early literacy skills from kindergarten through sixth grade. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of early literacy and early reading skills.

DIBELS are comprised of seven measures to function as indicators of phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency with connected text, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. DIBELS were designed for use in identifying children experiencing difficulty in acquisition of basic early literacy skills in order to provide support early and prevent the occurrence of later reading difficulties."

We got Aidan's DIBELs results back today from the testing in January (they also tested in August, and I imagine they'll test again sometime between Spring Break and the end of the year.  If you'll remember (or maybe you don't), last year when they did DIBELs at Creekside it threw Aidan's schedule off so bad he never did recover. This year he seems to have handled it much better.

The first area they scored him on was "Initial Sound Fluency" 

("The examiner presents four pictures to the child, names each picture, and then asks the child to identify (i.e., point to or say) the picture that begins with the sound produced orally by the examiner. For example,"This is sink, cat, gloves, and hat. Which picture begins with /s/?" and the student points to the correct picture. The child is also asked to orally produce the beginning sound for an orally presented word that matches one of the given pictures..."). 

In August he scored above the target goal which was 10-15 correct letter sounds, by identifying approximately 25 initial letter sounds. As of January 14th Aidan did so well he scored above graph bounds!!! That's right! Target goal was to identify 25-35 initial sounds, and he identified 74 (top of the chart was 70).

The next portion of the test was "Phoneme Segmentation Fluency" 

("assesses a student's ability to segment three- and four-phoneme words into their individual phonemes fluently... has been found to be a good predictor of later reading achievement... administered by the examiner orally presenting words of three to four phonemes. It requires the student to produce verbally the individual phonemes for each word. For example, the examiner says "sat," and the student says "/s/ /a/ /t/" to receive three possible points for the word...").

January was the first time he had been tested for this, and the goal was to identify 20-25 correct phonemes. Aidan scored well above this target by identifying 60 phonemes.

The third and last thing they tested him on was "Nonsense Word Fluency" 

 ("The student is presented a... sheet of paper with randomly ordered... nonsense words (e.g., sig, rav, ov) and asked to produce verbally the individual letter sound of each letter or verbally produce, or read, the whole nonsense word. For example, if the stimulus word is "vaj" the student could say /v/ /a/ /j/ or say the word /vaj/ to obtain a total of three letter-sounds correct. The student is allowed 1 minute to produce as many letter-sounds as he/she can, and the final score is the number of letter-sounds produced correctly in one minute.... students should receive a higher score if they are phonologically recoding the word, as they will be more efficiently producing the letter sounds, and receive a lower score if they are providing letter sounds in isolation. The intent of this measure is that students are able to read unfamiliar words as whole words, not just name letter sounds as fast as they can.") 

This had also not been tested before January, and the goal was to produce 20 correct letter sounds. Aidan achieved just above the targeted goal by correctly producing 33 letter sounds.

I'm so excited that Aidan has done so well on the DIBELS test this year. Obviously his reading skills have vastly improved. Ms. Simmons says he does very well reading in her class, and he seems much more interested in books and reading at home now that he's got a better understanding of how words work.  I can't wait to see him continue to learn and improve.