What are DIBELS?

DIBELS (Dymanic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) are assessments given to students in kindergarten through third grade to screen and monitor their progress in learning the necessary skills to become successful readers. It's important to note that not all subtests are addressed at each grade level.

What are the DIBELS skills assessed?

• Initial Sound Fluency (Kindergarten): measures the child's ability to identify, isolate, and pronounce, the first sounds of an orally presented word.
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• Letter Naming Fluency (Kindergarten to Grade 1): measures the child's ability to name as many letters as he or she can, uppercase and lowercase randomly mixed, within one minute.
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• Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (Mid-Kindergarten through End of Grade 1): measures phoneme awareness by asking the child to say the individual sounds that make up a word.
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• Nonsense Word Fluency (Mid-Kindergarten through Beginning of Grade 2): measures the ability to link letters with sounds (knows the alphabetic principle that uses the knowledge to decode three-letter syllables that alone are nonsense words).
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• Oral Reading Fluency (Mid-Grade 1 through Grade 3): measures accuracy and speed in oral reading of graded passages.