Written by Linda Williams, Title I Reading and Assessment Coordinator
A variety of assessments are used in the Portage Township School System in order to help students meet their educational goals. In the earliest grades, one of the tools used is referred to as "DIBELS." Many parents are unfamiliar with the test, as it was not in use at the time when they attended school. Having a basic understanding of the assessment is helpful as a parent monitors their child's progress.
DIBELS stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, and is comprised of five subtests that indicate a child's progress in the skills needed to become a proficient reader. The measures are brief, with each taking one minute to administer. All PTS Kindergarten, First, and Second Grade students are given the DIBELS assessment three times each year, helping teachers identify students who may be at risk for reading difficulties and need additional support throughout the year. In addition, Progress Monitoring can be done more frequently when needed. This helps teachers determine if the strategies used with a student are effective or if a change needs to be made.
The specific DIBELS subtests used at each grade level vary, depending on what is appropriate at each stage of development. Kindergarten students begin the year with Letter Naming Fluency and First Sounds Fluency. When assessing Letter Naming, the child is given a sheet with both capital and lower-case letters mixed together and is asked to identify the name of the letter. First Sounds Fluency was just added this year, assessing a student's ability to identify the initial sound within a spoken word.
For this subtest, the teacher gives the child a series of words, asking the child to identify the first sound of each word. Several practice items are given to help familiarize the child with the task.
Two more subtests are added by winter of the kindergarten year: Phoneme Segmentation Fluency and Nonsense Word Fluency. Phoneme Segmentation is a measure of a student's awareness of the many sounds that make up the words we speak. The child is given a word like "cat" and then asked to say all of the sounds in the word. Nonsense Word Fluency tests a student's knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds to read unfamiliar words. Children are shown a page of make-believe words, like "tob" or "miv" and asked to read them, saying either the individual sound of each letter in the word or the whole word itself. Nonsense words are used rather than real words in order to tell if the child is actually using their decoding skills rather than their sight vocabulary. In addition, when an older child encounters a multi-syllable real word, it often contains syllables of nonsense words. For example, "pos" by itself is a nonsense word but it is also the first syllable in the word "possible."
The ultimate goal of a beginning reader is to be able to read connected text with fluency and comprehension. This is measured by using the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency subtest, where the student is given a short passage to read aloud for one minute and then tell what the story was about. Children who read accurately and fluently are better able to understand what they read.
The staff of Portage Township Schools is committed to making sure every student is on target for success, and appreciates the efforts of parents toward this goal. Together, we will help your child become a successful reader.