Do You Dibel?

Hey K-2 parents and teachers,

  let's talk Dibels.

What is a DIBEL?

DIBELS Overview

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of early literacy skills from kindergarten through sixth grade. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of early literacy and early reading skills.

DIBELS are individually administered measures of student skills in each of the key basic early literacy skills.

DIBELS are comprised of seven measures to function as indicators of phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency with connected text, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. DIBELS were designed for use in identifying children experiencing difficulty in acquisition of basic early literacy skills in order to provide support early and prevent the occurrence of later reading difficulties.

History of DIBELS

DIBELS were developed based on measurement procedures for Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), which were created by Deno and colleagues through the Institute for Research and Learning Disabilities at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s-80s (e.g., Deno and Mirkin, 1977; Deno, 1985; Deno and Fuchs, 1987; Shinn, 1989). Like CBM, DIBELS were developed to be economical and efficient indicators of a student's progress toward achieving a general outcome.

Initial research on DIBELS was conducted at the University of Oregon in the late 1980s. Since then, an ongoing series of studies on DIBELS has documented the reliability and validity of the measures as well as their sensitivity to student change. The DIBELS authors were motivated then, as now, by the desire to improve educational outcomes for children, especially those from poor and diverse backgrounds. Research on DIBELS continues at DMG and at numerous universities and research institutions around the world.

(copied from http://dibels.org/dibels.html)

Dibels at Speas

We currently Dibel all of our K-2 students.  We use the information to inform our instructional practices and identify deficits in student learning.  Teachers, once you have identified weakenesses, your Imagine It intervention kit has excellent resources to use to develop the skills individual/ or small groups of students are lacking.  Here are some other resources for you to use.  I will also post these on the web resources section.

Teachers, you can pick up the Nokia devices in my office.  Please try to remember to plug them back in when you are finished using them. 

Dibels Electrified- Get to extra web-based activities categorized by: Letter Recognition, Rhyme, Letter Sounds, and Putting Words Together.  Great for computer lab, or workshop.

http://teachers.cr.k12.de.us/~galgano/dibelletter.htm

Read Write Think

http://www.readwritethink.org/

Dibels Schedule for WSFCS

Beginning of Year (BOY) Benchmarks:  September 12th-23rd

Middle of Year (MOY) Benchmarks:  January 24th-February 6th

End of Year (EOY) Benchmarks:  April 30th-May 18th

 

Remember, progress monitoring takes place every two weeks for students identified as red and every four weeks for students identified as red or yellow.