DIBELS information

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DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is a series of short tests designed to evaluate key literacy skills among students in kindergarten through 8th grade, such as phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The theory behind DIBELS is that giving students a number of quick tests, will allow educators to identify students who need additional assistance and later monitor the effectiveness of intervention strategies.

Mark Shinn originated "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Skills."^[1] The first subtests of this early literacy curriculum-based measurement system were created by Dr. Ruth Kaminski while she was a student of Dr. Roland Good at the University of Oregon with the support of federal funding.^[2] DIBELS is used by some kindergarten through eighth grade teachers in the United States to screen for students who are at risk of reading difficulty, to monitor students' progress, to guide instruction, and most recently – to screen for risk for dyslexia in compliance with state legislation.

The DIBELS comprise a developmental sequence of one-minute measures: naming the letters of the alphabet (alphabetic principle), segmenting words into phonemes (phonemic awareness), reading nonsense words (alphabetic principle), reading real words (orthographic knowledge), and oral reading of a passage (accuracy and fluency). DIBELS also includes a three-minute reading comprehension measure that uses the maze approach, which is a modification of the cloze test approach that provides students with answer choices for missing words.

DIBELS scores are intended to only be used for instructional decision-making (i.e., to identify students who need additional instructional support and monitoring response to intervention) and, as such, should not be used to grade students.