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Click on the links below to see the authors' responses to some of the most commonly asked generic IDEL® questions. For answers to questions about the individual IDEL measures, download the IDEL Administration and Scoring Guide from the DIBELS Data System. Do you have an inquiry that doesn't appear on the list? Email info@dibels.org to have your questions answered by the leading IDEL researchers and trainers at DMG.
- Where can I get IDEL materials?
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- Do you have IDEL progress monitoring materials?
- We currently have IDEL progress monitoring materials for phoneme segmentation fluency, (Fluidez en la Segmentación de Fonemas, FSF), nonsense word fluency (Fluidez en las Palabras sin Sentido, FPS), and oral reading fluency (Fluidez en la Lectura Oral, FLO).
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- In what grade levels can I use IDEL?
- IDEL can be used to assess students from kindergarten through third grade.
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- How do I enter IDEL data on the DIBELS Data System website?
- At this time, IDEL data must be entered into the DIBELS Data System, at the University of Oregon using a separate IDEL account. This requirement means that students who already have scores entered into the DIBELS Data System must be entered again into an IDEL account. In the near future, all student data will be merged into a single account and organized by both student name and ID number.
You can currently obtain all the reports available for DIBELS for IDEL including histograms, boxplots, summary of effectiveness reports, instructional recommendations, and progress monitoring graphs for both the individual and systems level.
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- Is it as important for students to acquire phonemic awareness in Spanish as it is in English?
- Although more research is needed that addresses the relation between phonemic awareness and reading in Spanish, the few studies that have researched this issue have found that there is a relation between phonemic awareness and reading (see attached references). In addition, studies in other languages with a transparent orthography like Spanish, (e.g., Italian and German) have also found that phonemic awareness is necessary for developing good reading skills.
Moreover, segmenting words into phonemes may not be necessary for Spanish native speakers who don't have difficulty in learning to read, but it may be very important for less skilled readers. Two studies that specifically support this argument come from Chile (Bravo-Valdivieso, 1995), and from Spain (Carrillo, 1994).
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- There are no benchmark goals for syllable segmentation, nor any measures that assess students’ ability to segment words in syllables. Isn’t Spanish a syllabic language, and therefore isn’t it important to assess students’ syllabic awareness in Spanish?
- There is a common misconception that Spanish is a syllabic language because of its overall regular and defined syllable structure. However, Spanish is not a syllabic language. Spanish is an alphabetic language, which means that letters represent individual sounds, or phonemes. It is the correspondence of letters to individual sounds, or phonemes, that makes an alphabetic language different from a syllabic language like Japanese Kana (where symbols represent syllables) or a morpho-syllabic language like Chinese (where symbols represent morphemes or real words) (McBride-Chung and Kail, 2002).
Because of the regular syllable structure in Spanish, syllabic awareness is easier to acquire than phonemic awareness (Jiménez and Ortiz, 2000). Thus, teaching syllabic awareness as a precursor to teaching phonemic awareness is a good idea. IDEL FSF has a column that can inform teachers if students are segmenting words at the syllable level or at the phoneme level. However, we don’t have benchmark goals for syllable segmentation.
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- What are the benchmark goals for IDEL?
- The benchmark goals for IDEL can be found at the DIBELS Data System website by clicking on the “Benchmark Goals” link on the blue, left-hand menu-bar.
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- Do you have Instructional Recommendations for IDEL?
- Instructional Recommendations have been established for grades K-3. A technical report that explains the instructional recommendations is available on the Publications and Presentations page.
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- To what extent can you use IDEL as evidence for determining English language proficiency?
- IDEL is a Spanish literacy assessment tool and therefore will not provide any information on students’ English language proficiency or English reading performance. IDEL can, however, help teachers determine students’ reading skills in Spanish. It can be used with English learners attending a bilingual program to provide additional information on students’ reading trajectory in their native language. Teachers should also assess English learners with DIBELS or another appropriate reading assessment in English if students are receiving English reading instruction, or will be transitioned to an English only program in the near future.
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- We have a third grader who has recently arrived at our school from a Spanish-speaking country. Can I assess him with IDEL even though we don’t have a native literacy program at our school?
- If you have trained examiners for IDEL, it is a good idea to find out if the student is a fluent reader in his native language. If a student is a fluent reader in Spanish, he/she will learn to read much quicker in English than a student who is a non-reader in his/her native language. A fluent reader in Spanish may need to work primarily on building vocabulary and learning difficult letter sounds and letter-combinations in English that don’t exist in Spanish. A non-reader in Spanish will need strong, continued reading intervention across grades to develop early reading skills in English.
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- Do IDEL test administrators have to be fluent in Spanish?
- Yes, IDEL test administrators must be fluent in Spanish. Examiners should be native speakers, or should feel comfortable both understanding and speaking with a Spanish native speaker.
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- What kind of training is required in order to administer IDEL?
- Examiners should have received training on the appropriate administration and scoring techniques for each of the measures by a trainer who has attended an IDEL Mentoring workshop. Information on upcoming IDEL Training Institutes that will feature an IDEL Mentoring workshop can be found on the Training Institutes page.
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 © 2009 Dynamic Measurement Group. All rights reserved. The information contained in these pages may not be published, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Dynamic Measurement Group.
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