Montville — Data from Montville schools' first year offering full-day kindergarten show improvement in early literacy skills among the town's kindergarteners.

At the end of the 2013-14 school year, 73 percent of kindergartners scored at or above "benchmark" on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) test.

At the end of the preceding school year, 60 percent of students met the benchmark, and 59 percent of students met the threshold the year before that.

"We would never hang our hat on one year of data," said Assistant Superintendent Laurie Pallin.

Still, "From this, I saw what I hoped to see, which is really nice," she said.

DIBELS tests literacy skills of students in kindergarten through sixth grade. The test for kindergartners is conducted one-on-one, in person, and focuses heavily on phonics.

Students at benchmark are able to do things such as identify a letter based on hearing its sound, look at a letter and say its name, break words down into different sounds and sound out nonsense words, according to David Larsen, custom support manager for the DIBELS Data System at the University of Oregon.

Pallin said that students scoring far enough below benchmark to need intervention tend to struggle to understand the correlation between a written letter and the letter's sound.

Scores are meant to help identify students in need of extra help, rather than provide a point of comparison between school districts.

"It's not a way really to compare your school," said Larsen. "It's more of, this is how we ID students and we give them additional support, and then we monitor to see if that additional support is working."

Some state education departments solicit district DIBELS scores to assess performance across the state. Connecticut will start soliciting scores from districts this year, as part of a statewide program aimed at improving reading comprehension among kindergarten through third-grade students, according to state Department of Education spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly.

Montville Superintendent Brian Levesque said the district would monitor its DIBELS scores over time to assess how full-day kindergarten impacts academic skills later on.

Pallin and Levesque said they believed the improvement in reading scores could be due to the increased class time full-day kindergarten provides. Students spend roughly half an hour more on both math and reading activities under the new schedule.

t.townsend@theday.com

Twitter: @ConnecticuTess

Editor's note: This version corrects an earlier version. The University of Oregon did not create the DIBELS test.

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