Nahant gets a read on Literary Skills

NAHANT — Johnson Elementary School students were granted an early release on Friday so educators could be trained to implement the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills.

DIBELS is a program composed of a set of procedures and measures for assessing students’ progress in literacy. In September 2022, the Commonwealth’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education amended its special-education laws to require all elementary schools to assess each student’s reading abilities and early literacy skills at least twice a year from kindergarten through third grade. Amplify Learning Education Consultant Ann Deveney met with the Johnson School’s teachers and taught them how to implement the assessment.

According to Principal Kevin Andrews, DIBELS is the only test method that currently meets the state’s requirements fully. Teachers will be administering the brief, one-to-one evaluation with the use of a Chromebook, which will facilitate the storage and analysis of learning data. This information is shared with parents at parent-teacher conferences, which are held at the end of the first and second trimesters. Andrews plans to have the test carried out three times per school year at the Johnson School for good measure.

DIBELS was founded by Dr. Ruth Kaminski while she was a student at the University of Oregon. Andrews said that its one-to-one element sets it apart from other programs.

“Previous assessments we’ve used, the student is on a computer by themselves trying to do their reading assessment,” Andrews said. “The great thing about this is that you’re with the teacher, the teacher has a computer, and the student has a piece of paper. In a short amount of time, you can collect data on their literacy skills.”

If a student’s assessment results are below grade level, the school must offer a meeting with their parents within 30 days.

In February, Gov. Maura Healey and her administration announced plans to invest $30 million in a new five-year initiative to improve early literacy education, called Literacy Launch. The initiative comes on the heels of a statewide analysis that found a majority of the state’s third-graders did not meet expectations in English language arts on last year’s MCAS exam.

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