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- What does ARI stand for?
- What exactly is DIBELS?
- What does FLUENCY really mean?
What does ARI stand for? ARI stands for Alabama Reading Initiative. To learn more about it, go to
the Alabama State Dept. of Education website in my "Links" section.
What exactly is DIBELS? Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills
It is a progress monitoring measure, given 3 times during each grade level.
Dibels are a series of short tests given to children in Kindergarten through
grade 3 (in Etowah County) to monitor and screen their progress in learning
the necessary skills to become successful readers. All Dibels measures are
timed, with most taking only one minute. The reason for the timing is to
find out if a child is able to respond automatically and not take a long
time to think about how to answer the questions or read the words
correctly. Having these basic reading skills at the "automatic" level
allows children to focus on understanding the meaning of what they are
reading. This is the primary goal for our children...comprehension.
THESE ARE THE DIFFERENT TESTS
Letter Naming
Kindergarten and first grade students are given a page with both capital and
lower case letters and asked to name each one. The test tells us if the
child is likely to struggle or be a successful reader in the future. It lets
the teacher know which students need explicit instruction in letter naming.
It only takes one minute to give this test.
Initial Sounds
By mid-kindergarten children should be able to recognize the beginning
sounds in words automatically. In the DIBELS assessment, students are given
a page with 4 pictures. They are asked to find the picture that starts with
a particular sound or to say the beginning or initial sound in a word. They
are asked 16 questions in this format.
Phoneme Segmentation
This is a measure of children�s awareness of the many sounds that make up
words we speak. It is given to kindergarten and first grade students and is
a skill that should be mastered by the end of kindergarten. An example of
this is: a child is told the word �cat� and asked to say all of the sounds
in the word. There are 3 sounds in �cat�. It is a 1 minute test.
Nonsense Words
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. It is
given to kindergarten, first, and second graders. The children are shown a
page of make-believe words, like �tob� or �miv� and asked to read them by
saying the individual sound of each letter in the word or the whole word
itself. It takes only 1 minute to give this test.
Oral Reading
This is a measure of how fluently and accurately children can read passages
written at their grade level. This is given throughout first, second,
third grade. The children are given three passages and asked to read each
one aloud for one minute. The words read correctly per minute are
calculated. Children who read accurately and fluently are better
able to understand what they read.
This information is from the Florida Center for Reading Research
http://www.fcrr.org
What does FLUENCY really mean? Fluency is the ability to read text accurately and quickly. Fluency is one
of the five key areas in learning to read. The other four are phonemic
awareness, phonics, comprehension, and vocabulary.
Fluency bridges word decoding and comprehension. Comprehension is
understanding what has been read. Fluency is a set of skills that allows
readers to rapidly decode text while maintaining high comprehension.
Sight reading some words is a skill of fluency. The idea is that children
will recognize at sight the most common words written in English and that
instant reading of these words will allow them to read and understand text
more quickly.
Many common English words are so irregular according to the rules of
phonics, so it is best to just memorize them from the start.
Some examples of �sight words� are: one, was, if, even, or, they, the.
Some experts in the field of beginning reading believe an over-emphasis on
sight reading can be counterproductive by having children focus on word
memorization while avoiding learning the important techniques of sounding
out words. A combination of mastering the rules of phonics along with
memorizing commonly occurring �sight words�, would be the initial strategies
for teaching a beginning reader.
Parents assist with fluency when they read aloud to children. Once the
child is reading at first to second grade level, exercises with timed
reading will help improve their reading speed. It demands parents and
teachers are actively involved.
Audio books for children, software and on-line reading programs can also
provide opportunities for children to follow along in the text as the
program reads aloud.
This information is from www.Time4learning.com
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