Early Childhood Assessment Why, What, and How (2008) / Chapter Skim
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8 Assessing All Children
8 Assessing All Children
Pages 233-280
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The next section deals with assessment of young children whose home language is not English, to whom we refer as English language learners. The final section treats the assessment of young children with disabilities.
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, cultural values, dialect/linguistic differences, historical and current discrimination, current geographic isolation, and other characteristics that marginalize a population to the majority society. In this section we provide a brief overview of the concerns about assessment of young minority children and examine the available empirical evidence on potential bias in assessing young children from birth to age 5.
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. The assumption is that since tests are designed for cultural values and practices of middle-class white children, minority children will be at a disadvantage and more likely to perform poorly because of a lack of exposure to, and a mismatch with, content included in the testing situation.
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. This can lead to a mismatch between the cultural content of the test and the cultural background of the person being assessed, so test items are not accurately reflective of the developmental experiences of the minority population.
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. It may be that the large proportion of minority children who score poorly on some standardized language assessment tools may have to do more with the fact the tests have been normed
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. Inappropriate Testing Situation and Examiner Bias Rarely examined is the assessor's influence on child assessments and whether assessor familiarity or unfamiliarity exerts a bias against different population groups.
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. More recently, excessive reliance on test scores for placement purposes has sent disproportionate numbers of minority children into special education programs and low tracks in middle and high school (Chachkin, 1989; Garcia et al., 1989; Rebell, 1989)
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Empirical Evidence About Potential Bias In 1983 Reynolds laid out the types of assessment test bias that may occur with minority populations and the need for empirical testing of assessment instruments. Twenty-five years later, this call for empirical research about bias has largely gone unanswered.
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A total of 64 assessment tools were searched across a number of developmental domains for empirical evidence about potential bias or fairness of the tool with English-speaking, minority populations. In all, 30 empirical articles were found that meet the committee's criteria.
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• Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test III (n = 5) • Preschool language scale (n = 1)
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Empirical evidence for potential bias with minority groups may be a result of the type of psychometric
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7. The empirical evidence available about bias for minority populations is almost entirely based on African American and Mexican American children (Madhere, 1998; Valencia and Suzuki, 2001)
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9. Most of the research on test bias, particularly cultural bias with minority populations, was conducted in the late 1970s and 1980s, with very few studies in the 1990s or later.
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. The lack of current available empirical evidence exploring test bias in early childhood assessment suggests that the subject has become peripheral among both policy makers and researchers.
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Young English language learners have been the fastest growing child population in the country over the past few decades, due primarily to increased rates in both legal and illegal immigration. Currently, one in five children ages 5-17 in the United States has a foreign-born parent (Capps et al., 2005)
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. Assessing the development of young English language learners demands an understanding of who these children are in terms of their linguistic and cognitive development, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they are raised.
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Finally, it is important to consider the socioeconomic status of English language learners, including family income as well as the amount of educational capital (i.e., parental education) in the home.
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. Legal and Ethical Precedents The impetus for appropriate and responsive assessment practices of young English language learners comes from a number of legal requirements and ethical guidelines, which have developed over time.
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Implementation research suggests that assessment practices with young English language learners continue to lag behind established legal requirements and ethical standards set forth by professional associations (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education, 1999)
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Many of the other native language assessments used with young English language learners focus on receptive vocabulary or provide a limited view of their development. Because of the limited availability of instruments to test the native language development of young English language learners, including receptive and expressive skills, school personnel are often forced to rely on informal assessments by teachers, aides, or other informants.
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assessments are also very common in early childhood education settings. Because of the inherent problems in assessing the cognitive skills of English language learners with language-loaded tests like the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children, Fourth ed.
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. Debates have continued over the past decades regarding the inclusion of English language learners in large-scale child assessment programs.
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Moreover, the construct and content validity of this tool and those like it need to be evaluated in light of cultural differences regarding definitions of behavior appropriateness and abnormality. Optimally, these assessment instruments would be developed in a culturally and linguistically responsive manner, specific to each of the different groups.
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. This has several implications for ongoing implementation research in the area of professional development and training for assessing young English language learners.
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This will require a bottom-up approach, meaning that assessment tools, procedures, and factor analytic structures are aligned with the cultural and linguistic characteristics of ELL children, as opposed to top-down approaches in which, for example, test items are simply translated from their original language to the native languages of young English language learners. Norm-based tests should also take into account important characteristics of the children, including their linguistic, ethnic, and socioeconomic histories.
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. In a supplement to their 2003 position statement on early childhood curriculum, assessment and program evaluation, the NAEYC presents seven detailed recommendations "to increase the probability that all young English language learners will have the benefit of appropriate, effective assessment of their learning and development" (p.
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For evaluation and accountability purposes, young English language learners should be included in assessments and provided with appropriate tests and accommodations. Second, screenings and assessments should be linguistically and culturally appropriate.
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Those assessing young English language learners should be bicultural, bilingual, and knowledgeable about second language acquisition. In many cases, consultants and interpreters are used when the supply of school personnel possessing these qualifications is limited.
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Specifically, almost 300,000 children under age 3 received early intervention services and more than 700,000 children ages 3 to 5 received special education and related services (https://www. ideadata.org/arc_toc8.asp#partbCC)
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of children ages 3 to 5 are reported to have a primary disability of speech and language impairment, with 35 percent having a primary disability of developmental delay (https:// www.ideadata.org/arc_toc8.asp#partbCC)
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States are required to serve all children ages 3 through 5 who have one of the 13 IDEA-specified disabilities and who have a demonstrated need for special education or related services. These are the same eligibility criteria that apply to children ages 5 through 21 with the exception of developmental delay, which can be used only with children through age 9.
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A multitiered model differs from traditional identification practices in that assessment is used first to identify children who are not benefiting from a highq uality program and then to monitor their progress when additional assistance is provided. If the amount of additional service deemed necessary for the child to show progress is beyond the scope of the regular program, then the child could be considered in need of special education (VanDerHayden and Snyder, 2006)
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. Progress Monitoring The phrase "progress monitoring" is currently used to describe two different kinds of assessment processes for young children with disabilities.
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The law requires periodic review and updating of the child's plan, but it does not address how assessment tools are to be used in this process. The use of ongoing assessment for planning and progress monitoring, however, is considered one of the indicators of a quality program for all young children, including children with disabilities (Division for Early Childhood, 2007; National Association for the Education of Young Children and National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education, 2003)
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Department of Education is requiring that all states provide data on progress made by young children during their time in IDEA-governed programs. States are employing a variety of approaches to obtain these data, including using a single assessment statewide, several online assessments, a summary process based on team decision making, and multiple sources of information that include formal assessment tools.
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. This recommendation is especially important for children with special needs, whose performance and behavior across settings and situations can be even more variable than those of typically developing children.
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. Qualities of good early childhood assessment, identified by Neisworth and Bagnato (2005)
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Assessment Challenges Children with special needs are assessed in large numbers and by a varied array of practitioners, yet little information about actual assessment practices is available. It would be useful to know what tools are being used, how child behaviors are being judged, how eligibility decisions are being reached, to what extent children with special needs are included in accountability assessments, and so on.
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. One of the basic principles of good assessments is that an assessment must have demonstrated validity for the purposes for which it is used (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education, 1999)
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compared the percentage of children served in the 28 states and the District of Columbia that allow the use of informed clinical opinion with those that do not and found no differences in the percentage of children served, suggesting that professionals in the states that allow for informed clinical opinion may not take advantage of this eligibility determination practice. Another practice problem associated with standardized norm-referenced assessments is that they do not provide information that is relevant for program planning because the items are chosen for their ability to discriminate among children.
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Even though there are no data on the validity of using standardized norm-referenced assessments with children with special needs for this purpose, national and statewide evaluation efforts, including the Head Start's National Reporting System, have used such measures with this population for these purposes. Currently, an assessment system developed by the state of California contains the only assessment tools that have been developed explicitly for large-scale data collection with young
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All assessments that require children to follow and respond to the examiner's directions require some degree of language processing. Even though test developers attempt to address this by keeping instructions simple, all young children are imperfect language processors because they are still learning language.
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Ironically, the impact of construct-irrelevant skills is greater for children with disabilities, because their development across domains may be less connected than it is for typically developing children. For example, completing a two-piece puzzle requires both cognitive and motor skills, skills that develop in tandem in typically developing children.
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The emphasis in many assessment tools on discrete skills and their organization into domains can operate as a barrier to recommended practice for practitioners, who are to use the results in partnership with families to identify the child's areas of need and plan interventions addressing meaningful functioning. Universal Design and Accommodations Universal design is a relatively new phenomenon that has direct application to assessment design for all children, especially young children with special needs.
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Many of the assessment tools in use today with young children predate the concept of universal design and thus were not developed to reflect these principles (California's Desired Results System being a notable exception)
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Criterion-based measures, which tend to be more observation-based, provide children with many and varied ways to demonstrate competence as part of the assessment procedures, an approach that reduces but may not eliminate the need for accommodations. An extensive body of literature has developed in the last 20 years on the use of accommodations of various kinds with various subgroups of school-age children with disabilities, as
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, and it is the implementation of large-scale data collection that precipitates the need for accommodations. Other Assessment Characteristics Individual assessment tools differ with regard to other features that have implications for their appropriateness for some children with special needs.
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Conversely, good assessment practices can be the key to improving the full range of services for young children with special needs: screening, identification, intervention services, and instruction. Good assessment practices will require investing in new assessment tools and creating systems that ensure practitioners are using the tools in accordance with the well-articulated set of professional standards and recommendations that already exist.
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