DIBELS Information Night for Kindergarten Parents

1. DIBELS Information Nightfor Kindergarten Parents • Monday, September 24, 200 • 6:30 – 7:30 P.M. • Mirage Elementary Media Center • Information about what DIBELS assessments means • Questions for the kindergarten teachers • Take-home materials to work with your Kindergartener

2. What is DIBELS? The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills.

3. The measures were developed upon the essential early literacy domains discussed in both the National Reading Panel (2000) and National Research Council (1998) reports to assess student development of phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding, and automaticity and fluency with the code. Each measure has been thoroughly researched and demonstrated to be reliable and valid indicators of early literacy development and predictive of later reading proficiency to aid in the early identification of students who are not progressing as expected. When used as recommended, the results can be used to evaluate individual student development as well as provide grade-level feedback toward validated instructional objectives.

4. Measures of Phonological Awareness: • Initial Sounds Fluency (ISF): Assesses a child's skill to identify and produce the initial sound of a given word. • Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF): Assesses a child's skill to produce the individual sounds within a given word. 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.

5. Tests for Kindergarten • Initial Sound Fluency - 25 or more sounds per minute. The DIBELS Initial Sounds Fluency (ISF) Measure is a standardized, individually administered measure of phonological awareness that assesses a child's ability to recognize and produce the initial sound in an orally presented word.

6. Phoneme Segmentation The DIBELS measure of Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF) does not assess all aspects of PA; however, it does provide an efficient and reliable indicator of the child's skill development of PA by assessing the development of a child's phonemic segmentation skills. 35 or more phonemes per minute by spring.

7. Phonemic Awareness Tasks Are At Different Levels of Complexity • Words in a Sentence • Syllables • Rhyming/Alliteration Onset-Rime • Phonemes • isolation, identity, categorization • blending, segmentation • Deletion, addition, substitution

8. Letter Naming Fluency Name 40 letters or more per minute. Students are presented with a page of upper- and lower-case letters arranged in a random order and are asked to name as many letters as they can. Students are told if they do not know a letter they will be told the letter. The student is allowed 1 minute to produce as many letter names as he/she can, and the score is the number of letters named correctly in 1 minute.

9. Nonsense Word Fluency The DIBELS Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) measure is a standardized, individually administered test of the alphabetic principle - including letter-sound correspondence and of the ability to blend letters into words in which letters represent their most common sounds. Students need to identify 25 sounds in one minute to be considered “Low Risk”.