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"Irony is discovering that the most cost-effective way to diminish low student achievement in high school occurs between birth and age five."
Lynn Fielding (Annual Growth, Catch up Growth) |
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The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills DIBELS is a formative early literacy assessment. It is use d by kindergarten through sixth grade teachers in the United States to assess how well students are developing early literacy skills. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of early literacy and early reading skills.
Many five year olds still not adjusted to separation from their mothers are simply overwhelmed by being escorted to an unfamiliar place in the school where a stranger with a top watch rushes them through a series of tasks and stops them before they have had any chance to figure out what is happening. The stranger with the stop watch marks a score sheet while timing each response and cutting off the child at the end of one minute.
What does DIBELS actually test for kindergarten level
Letter Naming tests the ability to rapidly and accurately identify upper and lower case letters. It lets the teacher know which students need explicit instruction in letter naming. It only takes one minute to give this test.
Initial Sound
By mid-kindergarten children should be able to recognize the beginning sounds in words automatically. The child identify the sound that the name of a picture starts with and to do it in three seconds. This test assess phonemic awareness- the ability to separate sounds from words- but it actually involves memory, the ability to abstract a part from a whole.
Phonemic Segmentation
This is a measure of children’s awareness of the many sounds that make up words we speak. This is a skill that should be mastered by the end of kindergarten.
Nonsense Word
This is a test of the ability to blend together the sounds represented by letters to make words. This skill helps children use their knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds to read unfamiliar words.
This test assess the “alphabetic principle”. A page of two and three letter “make-believe words” is shown to the child who can either say the whole “word” or say each sound separately. One point for each sound said correctly in one minute.
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"Read with a child. It's the most important 20 minutes of your day" The Children's Reading Foundation
      
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