DIBS for Kids

DIBS for Kids is on a Mission to help schools provide every child with access to powerful in-home reading experiences, every school night.

Marie Kovar, Team Lead for the LEAP Challenge, is the Director of School Support at DIBS for Kids. She is responsible for leading the program in over 250 classrooms across three states, which includes ordering all program materials, creating custom books sets in English and Spanish, leading expansions of the program to new schools and districts, as well as leading and collaborating with our School Support Coordinators to carry out all program activities.  Marie leads creation of all training materials for DIBS teachers and employees. She collaborates closely with our Executive Director on implementation of DIBS’ mission and strategy through support of strategic planning, development of our custom-built software, program development, and our longitudinal mixed methods evaluation. Marie supports the Executive Director and other employees with community and donor relations by attending and participating in funder meetings and school-based activities, supporting grant writing and uses her understanding of program needs to ensure DIBS’ funding and to strengthen community outreach efforts. She additionally supports teachers and school leadership to implement the program, along with School Support Coordinators, in person and via email, to carry out the mission and vision of the organization. 

The Team Lead and supporting team members are well-positioned to support the LEAP project this coming year since the organization as a whole are data focused and want to ensure we rely on research-based and strategic information to inform growth and sustainability. We are ready to dedicate the needed time to this project, in order to help support strategic and focused growth.The Team Lead and supporting team members are a collaborative group, are able to delegate and share tasks and support each other's work. Additionally, the Team Lead has experience in almost all aspects of the organization, allowing her to smoothly evaluate the needs and strengths of the program. She has a significant amount of experience with the program operations, promoting the program and its successes, using planned abandonment when something is not working, understanding the needs of the program and organization and also understands strategic planning, and community engagement.

Custom technology combined with access to physical books distributed from classrooms leads to improved reading proficiency and positive future outcomes.

DIBS is premised upon providing access to books for students where they are: the classroom, in order to solve the problem of access to a great book to read at home every school night to practice literacy skills and discover the joy of reading. DIBS leverages the best of classroom, school, public, and free little libraries and book giveaways, without the barriers of time, transport, finances, limited quantities, and potentially limited diversity, interests, and types of literature. 

Reading, and more specifically access to books, is a critical pathway for children to obtain greater reading and literacy outcomes. Unfortunately, children in low-income families have access to far fewer reading materials than children in middle- and upper-income families; 61% of low-income students do not have a single age-appropriate book at home. Having access to a wide variety of diverse, interesting, and age appropriate books that can bring students joy in reading is a necessary step towards achieving third grade reading proficiency. If the students cannot find joy in reading or find books that they can see themselves in and learn about others, proficiency will not come easily and that proficiency at the conclusion of third grade is critical for lifelong success, as children move from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”. High school graduation can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing a child’s reading proficiency at the end of third grade; if a child is not a modestly skilled reader by that time they are unlikely to graduate from high school. 

The need for reading support has been heightened by the pandemic. A July 2021 study conducted by the Center for School and Student Progress in collaboration with the NWEA found that minority and high-poverty students were disproportionately impacted by COVID learning loss, also known as “COVID slide”. Reading dropped between 4 and 10 points for Latino and Black students, as compared to 4 points for White students. High-poverty schools slipped between 4 and 11 points, while low-poverty schools experienced a 2 to 3 point drop. Results from 2020-2021 Nebraska Student-Centered Assessment Systems (NSCAS) show that only 29% of Omaha Public Schools Enrolled students are at reading proficiency at the end of third grade and third grade reading proficiency drops to 22% for students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch.  

Our combination of edtech and physical books has resulted in over 1,000,000 books read by over 12,000 DIBS students since 2012, with over 75% of students eligible for free or reduced lunch. DIBS’ vision is to provide all children with diverse, interesting, high quality books in their home to empower their own educational success.

DIBS (Delivering Infinite Book Shelves) for Kids was founded in January 2012 with a straightforward mission: that every elementary school child have access to powerful in-home reading experiences every school night. Since then, DIBS has evolved from a spreadsheet and small stack of donated books in the back of a North Omaha classroom to a comprehensive program providing daily access to books with custom-built software, over 30,000 books - each affixed with a unique QR-code, including over 5,000 in Spanish and five other languages - serving over 5,000 students in elementary schools.

Our solution is student led and easy for teachers to use in their classrooms. Each morning, students select a fun, diverse and age appropriate book directly from one of six DIBS book bins in their classroom, which are filled with over 200+ books. Then using DIBS’ custom built, web-based software, they select their unique avatar, and hold up their book to the wifi-enabled device with a camera to read the QR-code, and take their book home in their DIBS-provided student folder. The next day, students check-in their book by scanning the QR-code, and proceed to select their next book and start the process over again. Each student takes home on average three DIBS books per week. The books are considered infinite because every 4-6 weeks, teachers exchange their unique book set with another DIBS teacher, allowing the students to have fresh book choices.

DIBS for Kids’ program embraces all three learning variabilities: within person, within group, and contextual variability. Our solution is mainly focused on Kindergarten to 3rd grade students and we realize how much those students change in that time in terms of interest and ability. DIBS ensures, through research and analysis of our software data, that the books available to each student are of high quality and interest, cover a wide range of topics and genres and cover a wide range of age groups. We additionally understand that among our over 5,000 students, there is a lot of variability in reading abilities, which is why our solution and practices can help accelerate the reading skills of struggling readers and high performing readers as well due to the range of levels of text provided. Finally, the diversity of our book collections for each classroom provide for contextual variability in that they allow children read about a plethora of different concepts and ideas that they might never be exposed to in daily life; from koalas to big cities to unicorns and people who look different from themselves to artists and poetry. The world is an ever changing place, and many students do not have access to what is all out there, but through books, we can help them prepare to be successful in different contexts. 

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Externally, DIBS partners with Category One Consulting (C1C) to conduct a rigorous, external program evaluation that includes both summative and formative research. We began this process in 2018 with a Program Evaluation Proposal, with the goal to obtain definitive information on DIBS’ impact on reading proficiency, how to more accurately measure student involvement, and see what factors could increase participation. This project would then be used as a foundation for a more in-depth impact evaluation in the future. Then in 2019 the Implementation Evaluation was completed, allowing us to implement minor changes and prepare for the upcoming Impact Evaluation. The Impact Evaluation start date was delayed by one year due to the pandemic and implementation of remote learning. The current three-year external Impact Evaluation works to formally evaluate our program and isolate the impact of DIBS on reading proficiency and reading gains in Kindergarten through third grade as determined by school district and state assessments; the second year of that evaluation is just finishing and was conducted during the 2022-2023 school year. We will be continuing the student surveys during the 2023-2024 school year as well. The C1C impact evaluation is led by Amy McFeely, Ph.D. and Chris Fitch, M.A., both with extensive experience in impact and program evaluation in partnership with Omaha Public Schools, where DIBS is conducting its evaluation.

DIBS additionally takes time to gather foundational research on topics such as reading, instructional reading practices, impacts of poverty on children and learning, learning styles, impact on health outcomes and reading, plus more. This helps to inform our program and its development, while also allowing us to keep up with current information in the educational space and inform answers to grant proposals and respond to funders and other stakeholders.

DIBS is shown to improve reading proficiency scores. Prior to the pandemic, DIBS students had statistically significant improved reading proficiency scores compared to similarly-situated students who did not have DIBS. Now, post-pandemic, DIBS students are still making positive gains in reading proficiency compared to their peers, although students have, on average, nearly two years of learning loss. Most importantly, DIBS has buy-in from teachers, students, and families. Over 97% of teachers intend to use DIBS year-over-year in their classrooms and would recommend DIBS to fellow teachers. Teachers and families also overwhelmingly report that students are more confident readers, more motivated and excited to read, and reading independently. Sixty-eight percent of parents reported their children spend an hour or more reading independently each week and 77% reported their children spend an hour or more reading with an adult each week. As the research and our own experience shows, if students believe they can read, and have the books to do so, they will read.  Our external evaluation shows progress towards expected results.  

More specifically from the study, on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being strongly agree, teachers (n=66) think students: read more at home (8.68), are more motivated to read (8.53), and have improved reading abilities (8.08).  Families (n=111) report similar results, stating DIBS: helps me support my child’s reading (8.64), has a positive impact on my child’s reading ability (8.63), and has a positive impact on my child’s motivation to read at home (8.12). In the 2019-2020 school year, DIBS produced statistically significant outcomes on MAP testing, with 46% of DIBS students meeting MAP reading growth expectations, compared to 41% of the control cohort.  There is positive momentum again in the 2021-2022 school year data; 40% of DIBS students met MAP growth expectations compared to 38% of the cohort.

Moving forward, we will continue to work with C1C on the 3rd year of the impact evaluation, but we also know that we need more information on the impact of specific dosages of books that make significant differences, whether the impacts we are seeing now last beyond third grade and are there other factors, such as poverty, urban versus rural settings, and parenting that that also impact reading proficiency. 

Reading proficiency or the lack thereof presents a huge challenge to students as they get older and must read to obtain knowledge or learn material in other subjects. As a result, it’s important to identify reading programs for young students that put them on track to reading proficiency. As we have seen, numerous research studies have provided strong evidence of relationships among access to books in the home, time spent reading, and reading achievement but the studies often have small sample sizes and/or the information provided is qualitative versus quantitative. 

As an organization focused on providing access to books in the home and encouraging in-home reading, we would like to know if current program activities are leading to a measurable change in students’ reading achievement and growth.  As a result, we have contracted with an external evaluator to assess the implementation and impact of our program.  We know teachers, students, and families think highly of the program, and are currently working to assess on reading achievement as measured by state and local reading assessments.

Assuming we are able to find a longitudinal link between our program and reading achievement, we hope to be able to continue to share this information with funders and other supporters so we can continue to improve and expand the DIBS program.

In the future, we would also like to know if there are changes that we could make to our program that would lead to a greater impact on reading achievement and growth, while also being more targeted. One area we would like to study further is dosage. For example, tracking dosage of books for individual students and classrooms, coupled with quantitative testing data from the district(s) and while using a similarly situated control group would be beneficial. Another area of research that we are primed for is longitudinal analysis. Finally, we are currently only assessing data in an urban/low income area but we realize the need to expand our research into the rural areas we also serve. 

The time is right to engage in the LEAP project, as we are headed into our final contractual year of the current evaluation process and are needing to now look further into what our next steps will be with evaluation and data collection so we can continue to grow, while tracking our program’s impact on reading proficiency. 

1. Are there minimum dosage requirements in terms of books taken home on average each week, to make a statistically significant difference in reading proficiency as measured by MAP and NSCAS scores? 

2. Do the effects of DIBS last beyond third grade? (Do we need DIBS to have a statistically significant impact before we can meaningfully measure this?)

3. Does DIBS’  in-home reading program have a significant impact on reading achievement and growth above and beyond other factors (e.g., poverty, parent engagement with the program)?

Fellows could be of assistance in providing strategies and recommendations on how to use our current software and data from students and teachers to assess dosage requirements in terms of taken home on average each week, to make a statistically significant difference in reading proficiency as measured by MAP and NSCAS scores. Additionally, assessing if there is other information out there needed to assess this would be helpful. 

Fellows could also be of assistance in formulating a plan and scope of research to gather data on the question of “Do the effects of DIBS last beyond third grade?”. This might entail working with us to understand if we need further information about the need to have a statistically significant impact before we can meaningfully measure this and how do we meaningfully measure this if districts are not willing to provide additional data through their institutional review board. 

Fellows could be of assistance in helping us think this through from the beginning stages the question of does DIBS have a significant impact on reading achievement and growth above and beyond other factors such as poverty, parent engagement with the program, et cetera. Then additionally help us move forward with more specifics within this question to formulate a strategy as to how to best evaluate the question as well. 

Once the outputs are received, we will work closely with Category 1 Consulting, the firm who currently completes our formal evaluation, to develop an evaluation proposal that includes the above questions and additionally meshes well with our current evaluation. This evaluation proposal will inform our organization in regards to the feasibility of the project, the cost of the evaluation project and what information we will need to request from the institutional review board.

In the short-term, LEAP will help us to create a new plan with C1C in regards to further developing our evaluation and furthering our research-based reading program and its effectiveness. Additionally, with the outputs received, DIBS staff will be able to continue interorganizational research and discussion surrounding our program, reading and the implementation of educational programs in schools. 

In the long-term, LEAP will help us to further develop fundraising strategies, our reporting skills and assistance in the development of our web-based software to assist with reports and data. It will also assist us in developing the program at a higher level which in turn can help DIBS make improvements in reading growth among our students participating in the program.