Screening and Progress Monitoring

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS®)

Florida’s Reading First assessment plan includes the use of five DIBELS® measures for screening and progress monitoring. These measures are listed below.

Letter Naming Fluency (LNF)

LNF is administered to kindergarten students during all three assessment periods and during the fall assessment of first grade. LNF is an early indicator of a student’s risk for later reading problems. Accurate and rapid naming of letters is an important task that is highly related to the development of reading skills.

Initial Sound Fluency (ISF)

ISF is administered to kindergarten students during all three assessment periods. It examines a student’s emerging phonemic awareness skills. ISF determines if a student is able to identify the first sound in a familiar word and able to produce the first sound. This measure taps into the beginnings of phonemic awareness which is an area that further develops during the kindergarten year.

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF)

PSF is administered to kindergarten students during the winter and spring assessment periods and to first grade students during the fall and winter assessment periods. This oral task measures a student’s ability to break short words into individual phonemes.

Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF)

NWF is administered to kindergarten students beginning with the winter assessment period through spring of second grade. NWF provides insight into a student’s mastery of the alphabetic principle, which is the ability to associate sounds with letters and use these sounds to form words. Nonsense words are utilized to determine how well a student uses phonics skills to decode words. This is to ensure that a student is not reading words from memory.

Oral Reading Fluency (ORF)

ORF is administered to first, second, and third grade students during all assessment periods. This measure indicates how accurate and fluent a student is in reading an unpracticed passage on grade level.

Online training in DIBELS®administration and scoring

Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screener (FLKRS)

The Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screener (FLKRS) is administered within the first 29 instructional days to assess the readiness of each child for kindergarten. The FLKRS includes a subset of the Early Childhood Observation System (ECHOS) and the first two measures of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS®) for kindergarten (Letter Naming Fluency and Initial Sound Fluency) to gather information on a student’s development in emergent literacy skills.

Ongoing Progress Monitoring (OPM)

What is Ongoing Progress Monitoring?

The “D” in DIBELS stands for dynamic, meaning active and changing, which is exactly what OPM is all about. It is a process for monitoring students more frequently, using measures that align with their functional level and with the content of their instruction. DIBELS measures are formative (given along the way) assessments that give the classroom teacher a quick snapshot of how well students are progressing.

OPM provides the teacher with immediate feedback on the effect of the instruction. By using the data from OPM, the teacher may determine that there is a need to vary instructional methods or curriculum. The student may need a smaller group for teacher-led skill instruction, more time in the small group, a different strategy approach, or even a change in the curriculum.

When is OPM used?

Students with the most intensive instructional needs are at-risk for not achieving reading grade level expectations and may need to be progress monitored as frequently as once a week using measures that are on their instructional level. For students who are receiving supplemental instruction, progress monitoring every two or three weeks may be adequate. Most students who are functioning on grade level do not need OPM.

How is OPM implemented?

The first step to conducting OPM is to determine the student’s instructional or functional level. The decision rules flowcharts for determining instructional level and for determining the appropriate measure(s) for progress monitoring are available for download HERE

Please see ONGOING PROGRESS MONITORING for additional information.