Help! All of my student are in red in DIBELS!

by Liz Williams, School Psychologist

Research states that the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates:

• Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness
• Systematic phonics instruction
• Methods to improve fluency
• Ways to enhance comprehension

So, how do we ensure that students are getting these important literacy skills? How do we measure this? And how does this relate to DIBELS?

First, what are DIBELS? The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) were designed for use in identifying children who are experiencing difficulty in acquisition of basic early literacy skills in order to provide support early and prevent the occurrence of later reading difficulties. 

So what do I do with all of my students who are “red?” First, don’t freak out. DIBELS is a screener. It’s designed to be brief, efficient, and to identify students that are likely to need additional support. Check. Now you know which of your students need extra support. So what do I do next? DIBELS measures are not diagnostic. They are indicators of larger skill areas. It is important to teach those skill areas broadly and not teach to the test. The DIBELS materials have been designed for assessment, not for instruction, and should not be practiced. A good, research-based core reading curriculum should include activities to teach the essential skill areas, and you can supplement those activities with other reading programs as needed. Just as a pediatrician measures a child’s temperature as a quick and efficient indicator of a child’s overall health, each DIBELS measure is a quick and efficient indicator of how well a child is doing in learning a particular early reading skill. If you gave a child Tylenol before taking his temperature, his temperature might not be a good indicator. This is why it’s important not to teach nonsense words. A child’s ability to read non-sense words is an indicator that he or she has mastered the underlying skills that this particular assessment requires.

Most importantly, being able to read non-sense words in isolation isn’t going to help a child become a more effective reader. NWF is a measure that assesses alphabetic principle skills. Alphabetic Principle is:

1. The ability to associate sounds with letters and use these sounds to form words. It is composed of two parts:
• Alphabetic Understanding: Letters represent sounds in words.
• Phonological Recoding (blending): Letter sounds can be blended together and knowledge of the systematic relationships between letters and phonemes (letter-sound correspondence) can be used to read/decode words.
2. A prerequisite to word identification.

So, NWF is measuring a child’s alphabetic principal skills, which research states are an important component of becoming a proficient reader. If a child’s NWF is low, the next step is to figure out why.

Since DIBELS measure broad skill areas, you may need to get more information about which skills your students have mastered and which they need more explicit instruction on.  For example, if a student does poorly on nonsense word fluency (NWF), all we know is that they are struggling with some aspect of the Alphabetic Principle. We don’t know if they know their consonant and vowel sounds, how to blend, etc. A more diagnostic measure such as the CORE Phonics Survey could be useful in identifying specific areas that the student is struggling with.

In summary, DIBELS should be used as an identification tool and not an instructional tool. When used correctly, it’s just information for the teacher to use in identifying students who need additional support. It should not be used to develop targeted interventions. 

For more information:

https://dibels.org/bros/DIBELSBrochure.pdf

http://www.nichd.nih.gov/research/supported/Pages/nrp.aspx

To learn more about the Alphabetic Principle, visit the Big Ideas in Beginning Reading website:

http://reading.uoregon.edu/