DIBELS

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) is a reading screener used to identify students who are experiencing reading difficulties. As reading is pivotal to learning, early identification of reading challenges supports early and ongoing intervention for identified students.

This year, all schools in the Cairns Diocese will begin to implement DIBELS as a tool for screening student reading ability across Prep - Year 6.   Data from these screeners will be entered into a database called AMPLIFY, and teachers will then anaylse and use this data to inform their teaching practices.  Consent for the use of Amplify was sent home recently.

DIBELS subtests assess the basic early literacy skills of phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, fluency and comprehension and are aligned with the Science of Reading. They directly assess the BIG IDEAS of reading and directly link assessment to instruction. The subtests are:

• Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) (Prep - Year 1)
• Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) (Prep- Year 1)
• Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) (Prep - Year 3)
• Word Reading Fluency (WRF) (Prep - Year 3)
• Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) (Year 1 - Year 6)
• Maze (Comprehension) (Year 2 - Year 6)

There are different subtests allocated to each year level that focus on the skills necessary for their stage of reading development.  See below for the timeline of test administration.

DIBELS will replace the use of PM Benchmarks.  Students will no longer be given ‘a level’ of reading ability.  Instead, DIBELS will give teaching staff information about whether or not a student is on track for grade-level reading success.

For more information about DIBELS, see the attached Parent Guide or go to https://dibels.uoregon.edu/ .

Happy Learning,
Chris Edwards