Week Nine Assignment Two

            These different links were extremely helpful towards understanding the different test administered under DIBELS. Each component of DIBELS adheres to a specific part of basic literacy skills. With the help of each link provided to us, I was able to learn more about Initial Sound Fluency, Phonemic Segmentation Fluency, Nonsense Word Fluency, Oral Reading Fluency, and Retell Fluency. Initial Sound Fluency, ISF, and Phonemic Segmentation Fluency, PSF, both assess a child’s phonemic awareness. On the other hand Nonsense Word Fluency, NWF, assesses a child’s alphabetic principle. Oral Reading Fluency and Retell Fluency assess a child’s ability of accuracy and fluency.

            The Initial Sound Fluency test assesses a child’s ability to recognize and produce the initial sound in an orally presented word. In this test the examiner presents the student with four different pictures. He or she will verbally communicate to the child what each picture is and then asks the child to identify the picture that begins with the sound produced orally by the examiner. This test also asks students to try and produce the beginning sound of a word in the enclosed pictures. This test takes about three minutes to administer and score and also has 20 alternate forms to monitor progress.

            The Phonemic Segmentation Fluency test assesses a student’s ability to segment three and four phoneme words into their original phonemes fluently. This test is very good at predicting where a students reading level would be at a later point in time. The examiner would orally present words of three to four phonemes and asks the student to produce the individual phonemes of this given word. This test takes about two minutes to administer and score and has 20 alternate forms for monitoring progress.

            The Nonsense Word Fluency tests the alphabetic principle. The examiner would present the student with randomly VC and CVC nonsense words and will ask the student to produce either the individual sound of each letter in the nonsense word, produce the sound of the nonsense word or produce the sounds of both the individual letters and the entire nonsense word. The student is given one minute to produce as many letter-sounds as he or she can. The final score is the number of phonemes correct and is administered and calculated in two minutes. It also has over 20 alternate forms for monitoring progress.

            The Oral Reading Fluency and Retell Fluency test assesses the child’s accuracy and fluency with the connected tests. There are two parts to this test which include the first part of Oral Reading Fluency and the second part which is Retell Fluency. The Oral Reading Fluency asks the student to read a set of passages and calculates the number of correct words per minute from the passage. Words that are omitted, substitute, and hesitations that last for more than three seconds are scored as errors. If a child is able to self-correct within three seconds are scored as accurate. There are 20 alternate forms for monitoring progress. The Retell Fluency calculates the number of words used to retell the passage written. A child will be given thirty seconds to tell what he or she has just read. In the retell aspect of this exam, repeated words or phrases do not count as words given and personal experiences that connect with the text are not counted as well.

            These types of assessments of DIBELS are helpful towards understanding specific parts of students’ basic literacy skills. It was helpful to observe a video about administering these types of tests and seeing different examples of scoring these tests. I would be eager to try these types of assessments on my students.