DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is a series of short tests that assess K-8 literacy. It is a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of a set of K-8 literacy skills, such as phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The theory behind DIBELS is that giving students a number of quick tests, educators will have the data to identify students who need additional assistance and to monitor the effectiveness of intervention strategies. Mark Shinn originated "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Skills." The first subtests of this early literacy curriculum-based measurement system were created by Dr. Ruth Kaminski while she was a student of Dr. Roland Good at the University of Oregon with the support of federal funding. Research about this type of testing has always been done at the [University of Oregon] and the Center on Teaching and Learning. DIBELS is used by some kindergarten through eighth grade teachers in the United States to screen for whether students are at risk of reading difficulty, to monitor student progress, guide instruction, and most recently in compliance with state legislation regarding screening for risk for dyslexia. The DIBELS comprise a developmental sequence of one-minute measures: naming the letters of the alphabet (alphabetic principle), segmenting words into phonemes (phonemic awareness), reading nonsense words (alphabetic principle), reading real words (orthographic knowledge), and oral reading of a passage (accuracy and fluency). DIBELS also includes a three-minute reading comprehension measure that uses the maze approach, which is a modification of the cloze test approach that provides students with answer choices for missing words. DIBELS scores are intended to only be used for instructional decision-making (i.e., to identify students who need additional instructional support and monitoring response to intervention) and, as such, should not be used to grade students. Criticisms DIBELS has become a fairly widely used assessment for early reading intervention by many schools in the United States but since its development and release, there have been many critics challenging the effectiveness and validity of the DIBELS assessments. One criticism has been that although the Official DIBELS homepage claims that there is an abundance of research validating the DIBELS assessments much of that was unpublished. "Of the 89 references listed, only 18 are published in professionally reviewed journals in the fields of psychology, special education, or music therapy, and eight are chapters in edited books." Similar criticism notes that