The base tier addresses the needs of children who make adequate progress in a general program, the next tier refers to supports provided to children who need additional general assistance, and the third tier refers to more specialized assistance for children not succeeding in the previous tiers. Universal screening with a tool. Those identified as not making progress are provided with additional empirically supported interventions or instructional strategies and their prog- ress is monitored on a regular basis to determine the effectiveness of the intervention, with additional intervention provided to those who continue to show limited progress.
Although there is considerable interest in applying tiered models to preschool, how the principles would be applied has not been thoroughly developed, and there has been very little research to date on the application to early education Coleman, Buysse, and Neitzel, ; VanDerHayden and Snyder, One concern is whether the early and frequent use of assessment to single some children out as requiring additional assistance is necessary, or even potentially harmful, before the children have had the opportunity to benefit from a high-quality preschool experience. Is it meeting our goals?
This may look a lot like progress monitoring assessment, and indeed the selection of tools for the two purposes might be identical. But evaluation differs from progress monitoring in two key ways. First, progress monitoring assessment is meant to be useful to those inside the program who are responsible for day-to-day decisions about curriculum and pedagogy, whereas evaluation of program effectiveness is useful to those making decisions about funding, extending, or terminat- ing programs.
Using assessments for accountability purposes may seem simple, but in fact interpreting test data as reflecting the value of a program can be risky. There are many challenges to the conclu- sion that a program in which children perform poorly at the end of the year should be terminated. What if they were extremely low scorers at program entry and made notable progress, just not enough to reach the norm or criterion? What if the program is basically sound but disruptions to financing or staffing led to poor implementation in this particular year?
What if the pro- gram is potentially good but investments in needed professional development or curricular materials were denied? What if the alternative program in which the children would end up if this one is terminated is even worse? Challenges like this have been widely discussed in the context of accountability consequences for school-age children under NCLB, and they are equally applicable to programs for preschoolers.
In other words, establishment of program-level accountability is a legitimate and important purpose for assessment, but not one that can be sensibly met by sole reliance on child-focused assess- ment data. Accountability is part of a larger system and cannot be. We say more about the impor- tance of the larger system in Chapter Program Impacts A more specific purpose for assessing children participating in a particular program is to evaluate the impact of that program, ideally in comparison to another well-defined treatment which might be no program at all , and ideally in the context of random assignment of individuals or classrooms to the two conditions.
Under these relatively rarely encountered ideal experimental circumstances, it is appropriate to sample children in programs rather than testing them all, and it is possible, if one is willing to limit claims about program effectiveness to subsets of children, to exclude groups of children English language learners, for exam- ple, or children with disabilities from the assessment regimen.
Furthermore, these studies provide policy makers and the public with a view of what the society is doing well and not so well at. The movement to develop early learning guidelines can be seen as a contribution to the social benchmarking effort;. It goes far beyond our charge to discuss in any detail the use of assessments for research purposes.
Nonetheless, because researchers of child development have indeed innovated and in many cases refined the tools adopted for use by education practitioners and policy makers, it seems churlish not to acknowledge this important and generative line of work. Guidelines for Administering and Using Child Assessments Appropriately for Various Purposes Organizations concerned with early childhood development and learning have recognized the potential good that can come of child assessment as well as the harm that incorrect uses or interpretations of such assessments can cause.
Several of them have developed position statements or guidelines for the use of assessments with young children, with the intention of maximiz- ing the benefits and preventing harm. Some of these documents are listed in Box The more recent of them incorporate and expand on earlier ones to a large extent.
Thus, the entire set represents a relatively coherent set of guidelines for selection, use, and interpretation of early childhood assessments. Several of these documents agree, for example, on the following important guidelines for individual assessment:. Special Considerations When Using Child Assessments for Accountability Particular care is needed in moving from child-focused to accountability-focused purposes for assessment.
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Data collected for accountability purposes are never meant as a basis for draw- ing conclusions or informing program personnel about individual children. Instead, they are meant to be useful to funders, state and federal policy makers, and others responsible for making decisions about a program or policy, and for this purpose it is completely appropriate to use sampling.
However, in many cases, states are attempting to use the same data for accountability and for progress monitoring purposes. The wisdom of this approach is questionable, although the apparent efficiencies are understand- ably seductive. Progress monitoring, however, requires data at the individual child level from all children. Decisions about accountability should never rest solely on findings from child-directed assessments.
Information about the conditions under which the program is operating and about the characteristics of the families and children it is serving are crucial to making valid inferences from child performance to program quality. Many other safeguards must also be in place, which are discussed in Part III.
Considerable guidance about accountability assessment is available from the documents listed in Box , as well as from a recent Pew Foundation report National Early Childhood Accountability Task Force, The tools used for various accountability purposes are often adaptations of tools developed for other purposes. These requirements are particularly difficult to meet when assessing young children.
Standardization of administration conflicts with establishing a trusting relationship with a child, for example, and standardiza- tion of interpretation conflicts with using all the information available. The reliability of standardized tests is threatened when they are shortened for use with large groups, and brief forms may generate information too sparse to be interpretable, in particular for children from language and cultural minorities and children with disabilities.
Thus such abbreviation or adaptation requires careful evaluation of the psychometric properties of the adapted or abbreviated instruments. The value of assessments therefore requires fundamental attention to their purpose and the design of the larger systems in which they are used. Early Childhood Assessment addresses these issues by identifying the important outcomes for children from birth to age 5 and the quality and purposes of different techniques and instruments for developmental assessments. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.
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Early Childhood Assessment
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Why, What, and How Chapter: The assessment should reflect everyday relationships and experiences. It should be conducted in familiar contexts and settings such as the classroom.
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Observations are ongoing and diverse. Assessment is a cycle. Although specific methods for assessment tools vary, the process is cyclical. The cycle allows educators to make changes to their curriculum to better serve children in their program.
Early Childhood Assessment: Resources for Early Learning
The cycle is as follows: Observe children in various situations. Record while observing or as soon as possible.
Study the data with assessment tools. The assessment comes from the combination of documentation and evaluation. Summarize, Plan, and Communicate. Snow and Susan B.
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- Early Childhood Assessment: Why, What, and How | The National Academies Press.
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The National Academies Press, The Power of Observation: Birth through Eight 2 nd edition by Judy R. Teachers College Press, Spotlight on Young Children and Assessment.