One of the interesting things about being a parent is seeing all the crazy assessment tools that teachers use to evaluate children. One that was new to me was DIBELS Benchmark Levels. We got a letter home with some scores for CXO and what they meant ( 1- 10, kid is at risk, 10 -34, kid has some risk, 35 +, kid is fine, etc.). He scored amazingly high, but I wanted to find out what it was all about. The University of Orgeon has the answer:
DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills)
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.
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.
The cool thing is that these tests are conducted in less than a minute per kid. They also have all sorts of assessment materials, data upload tools, and explanations of the system. Good stuff.
The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are
comprised of the following measures:ISF: Initial Sounds Fluency
LNF: Letter Naming Fluency
PSF: Phoneme Segmentation Fluency
NWF: Nonsense Word Fluency
ORF: DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency
RTF: Retell Fluency
WUF: Word Use Fluency