Getting your DIBELS data on board

We know many schools are keen to get their DIBELS data uploaded - this article will walk you through our current process, and plans for DIBELS moving forward.

🤔 What's Intellischool doing to get DIBELS data uploaded? 

For those who have been in touch with us about DIBELS recently, you may be aware that we’ve come across a wide range of different data formats for DIBELS results from different schools. These different data formats have caused some hiccups for our data ingestion tool inside Intellischool Analytics. As a result, we’ve been working to determine how we can best navigate the different data formats schools are working with to ensure that we can successfully ingest DIBELS data for all schools, and to ensure that the effort required for schools is kept to a minimum.

Our long-term plan is to provide a tool that teachers can use to capture DIBELS results in a standardised manner, that will also work as best as possible with your existing processes around DIBELS. In the meantime, we’ve determined that the best and quickest method for now will be to ask schools to send through their DIBELS results spreadsheets, regardless of the format, but bearing in mind certain minimum requirements for particular data/columns. We'll then arrange for this DIBELS data to be manually ingested by our team.

🤔 How do I upload DIBELS data? 

You can send through a spreadsheet of your DIBELS results in whatever format you have at present, as long as it contains the minimum data laid out below.

We’ve answered a few FAQs below:

💬 What kinds of file formats can I send through?

You can send through any spreadsheet file format, such as Excel or Google Sheets.

💬 Do the data columns need to be in a certain order?

Your data columns can be in any order, as long as it contains the information listed below.

💬 Which editions of DIBELS are supported?

We’re currently only able to work with 8th Edition DIBELS results - we’re planning on adding support for earlier editions at a later date.

💬 What information does my spreadsheet need to include?  

For each row/student in your spreadsheet, you must include:

• School year
• Test date
• Student last name
• Student first name
• Student ID (Optional but strongly preferred - a big help for us!)
  This is the student number associated with each student inside your SIS
• Student year level
• Test year level
  This may differ from 'Student year level' if the student in question has taken a test of a higher or lower level than their actual year level
• Benchmark period
  This will be either BOY (Beginning of year), MOY (Middle of year) or EOY (End of year)
  

Depending on the year level, you may or may not have scores for all of the below test types, but the scores must be included where available:

• Letter Names (LNF) - Raw score
• Phonemic Awareness (PSF) - Raw score
• Letter Sounds (NWF-CLS) - Raw score
• Decoding (NWF-WRC) - Raw score
• Word Reading (WRF) - Raw score
• Reading Fluency Words Correct (ORF) - Raw score
• Reading Fluency Accuracy (ORF) - Raw score
• Reading Comprehension (Maze) - Raw score

💬 I'm stuck with some of the required information...

Not to worry! Our team are more than happy to jump on the phone or on to a Zoom call to support you further. Reach out to help@intellischool.co anytime if you need support with the above.

🤔 What happens once I've followed the above steps?

Once you’ve sent through your results spreadsheet, our team will confirm that we’ve received it, and that it contains all of the required information. We’ll then give you an idea of how long it will take for us to manually ingest the data, and will then follow up once the process is complete.

Moving forward, as noted above, our long-term plan is to provide support for schools to standardise their DIBELS data for easier ingestion, so we expect that this manual process isn’t something that we’ll need to do again in the future. (Thank goodness!)