Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)

DIBELS stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. It is an assessment tool that has been developed through research to measure the critical aspects of reading skill acquisition. Brief measures of pre-reading and reading skills will be gathered. DIBELS consists of five targeted areas. These areas include the following:

  • Letter Naming Fluency--measures the number of letters a student can name in one minute
  • Initial Sound Fluency--the student must recognize and produce the initial sound of a given picture
  • Phoneme Segmentation Fluency--the student must fluently segment words into their individual phonemes
  • Nonsense Word Fluency--the student must blend common letter sounds into words fluently, and
  • Oral Reading Fluency--the student must read grad-level passages accurately and fluently.

The student's grade level depicts which of the five areas are administered.


Local norms refer to data that has been collected from a local sample of subjects who are learning from the same curriculum. In this case, the data will be collected for each K-3 in each school building. Thus, teachers will be provided with the average student performance for their grade-level as well as where each student in that grade performs in relationship to the average.
The benefits of having this data available includes the following:

  • Students can be compared to their grade-level peers rather than to a national average in which school curriculums vary greatly.
  • DIBELS can be used as a screening tool to track at-risk students for reading difficulties and to provide early intervention.
  • The data will help accurately determine discrepancy from peers during the Flexible Service Delivery meetings when there are reading concerns.
  • DIBELS is designed to be a progress monitoring tool so teachers can assess students throughout the year to evaluate the amount of progress they are making as well as the success of interventions being implemented.
  • Teachers can use this information during parent-teacher conferences to visually inform parents of their child's performance in relation to the class average.
  • DIBELS targets grades K-3 when phonemic awareness is most important.

Because this data is being collected for all students in the targeted grades, we will be sending a negative consent letter to parents of children in these grades. What this means is that all parents will be notified in a letter of the process and will only have to contact the school is they do not wish for their child to participate.

For more information, check out the Official Dibels Homepage