Early Childhood Assessment Why, What, and How (2008) / Chapter Skim
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In this atmosphere, Congress has enacted such laws as the Government Performance and Results Act and the No Child Left Behind Act. School systems and government agencies are asked to set goals, track progress, analyze strengths and weaknesses in programs, and report on their achievements, with consequences for unmet goals.
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Second, assessment activity should be conducted within a coherent system of medical, educational, and family support services that promote optimal development for all children. Our focus on the need for purposefulness and systematicity is particularly important at this time, because young children are currently being assessed for a wide array of purposes, across a wide array of domains, and in multiple service settings.
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Direct assessments may make children feel anxious, incompetent, or bored, and indirect assessments may constitute a burden on adults. An assessment activity may also deflect time and resources from instruction, and assessments cost money.
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Once a purpose has been established and a set of domains selected, the next challenge is to identify the best assessment instrument; this may be one that is widely used, or an adaptation of a previously used instrument, or in some cases a newly developed instrument. The varied available approaches, which include conducting direct assessments, interviewing parents or teachers, observing children in natural or slightly structured settings, and analyzing their work, all constitute rich sources of information.
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Although the same measure may be used for more than one purpose, prior consideration of all potential purposes is essential, as is careful analysis of the actual content of the assessment instrument. Direct examination of the assessment items is important because the title of a measure does not always reflect the content.
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(D-5) Selecting domains to assess requires first establishing the purposes of the assessment, then deciding which of the var ious possible domains dictated by the purposes can best be assessed using available instruments of proven reliability and validity, and considering what the costs will be of omit ting domains from the assessment system (e.g., reduction of their importance in the eyes of practitioners or parents)
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(I-9) For large-scale assessment systems, decisions regarding instrument selection or development for young children should be made by individuals with the requisite program matic and technical knowledge and after careful consid eration of a variety of factors, including existing research, recommended practice, and available resources.
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B. Assessments: Multiple approaches to documenting child development and learning and reviewing program quality that are of high quality and connect to one another in well defined ways, from which strategic selection can be made depending on specific purposes.
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E. Opportunity to learn: Procedures to assess whether the environments in which children are spending time offer high-quality support for development and learning, as well as safety, enjoyment, and affectively positive relationships, and to direct support to those that fall short. F. Inclusion: Methods and procedures for ensuring that all children served by the program will be assessed fairly, regardless of their language, culture, or disabilities, and with tools that provide useful information for fostering their development and learning.
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The 1999 NRC report High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation urged extreme caution in basing high-stakes decisions on assessment outcomes, and we conclude that even more extreme caution is needed when dealing with young children from birth to age 5 and with the early care and education system. We emphasize that a primary pur pose of assessing children or classrooms is to improve the quality of early childhood care and education by identifying where more support, professional development, or funding is needed and by providing classroom personnel with tools to track children's growth and adjust instruction.
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(S-8) Implementing assessment procedures requires skilled admin istrators who have been carefully trained in the assessment procedures to be implemented; because direct assessments with young children can be particularly challenging, more training may be required for such assessments.
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References to the need for research on assessment tools and the building of an assessment system are distributed throughout this document. Major topics of recommended research, with details in Chapter 11, are • research related to instrument development, • research related to assessment processes, • research on the use of assessment tools and processes with special populations, and • research related to accountability.
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