What are the DIBELS measures?
The DIBELS were developed at the Early Childhood Research Institute on Measuring Growth and Development at the University of Oregon. They are designed to measure the important skills good readers use in reading. These skills include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Each measure takes between one and three minutes to administer and there are multiple forms available for repeated assessment. The measures have extensive research to document how they accurately predict performance on these important outcomes. The technical reports are available from the University of Oregon website at http://www.uoregon.edu/techreports/index.php. Descriptions of the measures: Letter Naming Fluency – this test assesses how fluently a child can name the letters on a page. The child has one minute to name as many letters as he/she can. Initial Sounds Fluency – assesses a child’s skill to identify and produce the initial sound of a given word. This is a measure of early phone
Related Questions
- When students are known to be well below grade level, shouldn’t we be using DIBELS measures at their functioning level rather than their assigned grade level?
- If someone has been trained to administer DIBELS and has conducted numerous administrations of all of the measures, can that person train others in DIBELS?
- What are some of the more common errors that might be made when first learning to administer the DIBELS measures?
