Somewhere, a 4th grader is gripping a No. 2 pencil in his sweaty
palms, about to take a test that might determine his school's
accreditation or future funding. At the very least, the results from
the child's school will be posted on the Internet or printed in the
newspaper.
Somewhere else, a high school senior may be reviewing the algebra
she's learned, trying once again to pass an exam that will make or
break her attempt to earn a high school diploma.
Meanwhile, a group
of 4-year-olds is building a tower with blocks, playing a game, or
telling a story to a teacher. Like the standardized or
standards-based tests given to their older peers, the young
children's play may
be used to evaluate the program that they attend, inform parents
whether their children are ready to move on to kindergarten, or help
the teacher understand what challenges and experiences the pupils
need to make the developmental leaps common in their age group.
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There's a growing demand to assess the
results of early-childhood programs, but no consensus on what's
appropriate.
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But
the experience will have none of the high pressure of entering a new
situation and trying to master a set of skills that dominates testing
in the K-12 arena.
The contrast demonstrates that assessment and
accountability are completely different in preschools, Head Start,
and other early-childhood programs that a majority of children
experience before they enter the K-12 system.
Assessments in
early-childhood programs must be different from the kinds of tests
youngsters take after they're in school, experts say, because young
children are especially subject to wide variations in their
development. Their skills grow in fits and starts, so an assessment
of their academic skills one month could be out of date the
next.
Moreover, along with their cognitive skills, preschoolers are
also working to develop their motor and social skills, which are best
judged by observation rather than a formal assessment.
As state and
local policymakers start to demand data that show the impact of their
spending on early-childhood programs, assessment experts find
themselves searching for ways to obtain that information accurately,
fairly, and in a way that's best for children.
"It's very complex,"
says James H. Squires, a consultant in early-childhood education for
the Vermont education department. "What we're grappling with is: How
do you do it at all? How can you get meaningful, accurate results
without doing damage?"
Some state officials are requiring local
programs to evaluate themselves using whatever method they choose.
Others specify the kinds of assessment tools to be administered.
Still others are collecting statewide data by giving a specific
assessment or a combination of them to a sample of children in the
state's early-childhood programs.
So far, though, none has come up
with a uniform or even widely accepted method for assessing young
children.
"There hasn't been something that people could call a
standardized way to assess children this age for accountability
purposes," says Catherine Scott-Little, a senior program specialist
for Serve, the Greensboro, N.C., federally financed research
laboratory serving the Southeastern states.
The
Foundation
As
state leaders begin wading into testing young children, most are
building their systems around the recommendations of a 1998 report
issued by the National Education Goals Panel, a federally subsidized
committee of state and federal policymakers.
The panel convened a
group of early-childhood experts to define how states and districts
should monitor progress to ensure that children enter school ready to
learn—the first of the education goals set for the nation that were
to be achieved by 2000. At the end of 1999, the goals panel reported
that the goal had not been reached.
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As state leaders begin wading into testing
young children, most are building their systems around the
recommendations of a 1998 NAEP report.
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The 40-page booklet released by
the panel in 1998 suggested that early-childhood programs evaluate
individual children's skills, starting at age 3, and aggregate them
as part of a formal appraisal of the programs. Not until children
reach the 3rd grade, the report concluded, should high-stakes
assessments be used to hold schools, students, and teachers
accountable.
"Before age 8, standardized achievement measures are
not sufficiently accurate to be used for high-stakes decisions about
individual children and schools," the booklet said.
But
early-childhood programs must conduct assessments for other purposes.
Under
federal special education law, districts and federal programs have
been required to screen children who are suspected of having a
disability. Head Start programs, for example, must assess children's
physical and learning abilities within 45 days of their
enrollment.
Such screening "helps to identify children who may
be at risk for school failure," says Samuel J. Meisels, the president
of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study of Child Development, a
Chicago graduate school. "It can be done simply, inexpensively, and
fairly accurately."
According to the Erikson Institute, 15
states and the District of Columbia require diagnostic or
developmental screening for children in prekindergarten.
Assessing
youngsters to determine the success of the programs in which they're
enrolled, however, is new territory for most states, Scott-Little of
Serve says.
Of the statewide pre-K programs, "very few have begun
to invest in assessment," says Meisels, one of the creators of the
Work Sampling System, an assessment instrument that many states use
in early-childhood programs and kindergartens.
Getting
Started
Even those states in the forefront are just now
getting
started and searching for the best ways to evaluate children's
progress and programs' success.
North Carolina, for example,
collected data from 1,034 kindergartners in fall 2000. The study
tried to determine, for the first time, how well a variety of
early-childhood programs prepared children to enter
school.
Researchers
gave a representative sample of 10 percent of the state's new
kindergartners assessments that gauged an assortment of skills, such
as vocabulary, literacy, and social development. The research team
selected portions of several different assessment batteries,
including the Woodcock Johnson Test of Achievement-Revised Form A and
the Social Skills Rating System, because the team couldn't find one
product that fit all its needs, according to Kelly Maxwell, who
headed the project.
| While some states are coming up with statewide
ways of measuring young children's abilities, others are letting
individual programs monitor themselves.
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"Some people thought there would be one magic
test out there," says Maxwell, a research investigator at the Frank
Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. "It didn't work that way."
The study also
surveyed parents, teachers, and principals about the school readiness
of kindergartners.
In the end, the published report included only
general findings and none of the specific score data that are common
in accountability systems for the upper grades. For example, the
study found that North Carolina's kindergartners "generally knew the
names of basic colors," and that they had "demonstrated a wide range
of social skills" that "were about as well-developed" as those of
kindergartners nationally. Their language and math skills fell below
the national averages.
Despite the generalities of the conclusions,
the report has made a valuable contribution in the debate over how to
improve early-childhood programs in North Carolina. "This is what we
know about our children and our schools," Maxwell says. "It sets the
stage for a discussion."
Maryland collected information on 1,300
kindergartners using portions of the Work Sampling System. In that
system, teachers continually observe their students and note their
progress in such areas as language, mathematical thinking, scientific
thinking, physical development, and social and personal
skills.
Even though scores from the Work Sampling System are based
on teacher observations, the results are as reliable as older
students' standardized-test scores, according to studies conducted by
Meisels and his colleagues at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, where until recently he was a professor of education.
In a
report published last year, Maryland concluded that about 40 percent
of the state's kindergartners entered school "fully ready to do
kindergarten work." Half needed "targeted support" so they could
succeed in their first year of school, and 10 percent
required "considerable support" from their kindergarten
teachers.
In particular, the children needed the most help in
mathematical and scientific thinking, language development, and
social studies.
"I don't think we were surprised by anything," says
Trudy V. Collier, the chief of language development and early
learning for the Maryland education department. "There's a real need
for children to be read to, talked to, and encouraged to participate
in conversations."
Last fall, every kindergarten teacher evaluated
every student using the same set of Work Sampling System indicators.
The state hopes to use the results to continue tracking school
readiness.
While the overall results are general, individual
student outcomes help teachers design curricula to meet their
classes' needs, Collier says. "They begin to establish very early
what a child's specific needs and gifts may be," she says.
Other
states are taking similar approaches, according to Scott-Little. She
led a brainstorming session last fall for officials in the states
that are furthest along in assessing early-childhood
programs.
Missouri's School Entry Profile collects data from new
kindergartners, and the state uses the results to shape policies for
early-childhood programs. In Ohio, teachers are collecting data on
4-year-olds' skills so the state can evaluate the early-childhood
programs. The process may also help teachers prepare curricula for
their classes, Scott-Little says.
Do-It-Yourself
Approaches
While
some states are coming up with statewide ways of measuring young
children's abilities, and the success of programs serving them,
others are letting individual programs monitor
themselves.
Michigan, for example, has a prekindergarten program
serving more than 25,000 youngsters in 1,000 classrooms, but it has
only three part-time consultants to evaluate them, according to Lindy
Buch, the state's supervisor of curricular, early-childhood, and
parenting programs.
The state has chosen to train local program
directors to evaluate their own programs, using a tool created by the
High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, a leading research and
development group on early-childhood programs. In addition, the
Ypsilanti, Mich.-based High/Scope is conducting in-depth reviews of
randomly chosen programs to give a statewide snapshot of the
program's success.
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Assessments in early- childhood programs
must be different from the kinds of tests youngsters take after
they're in school, experts say.
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Evaluators score the program on a variety of
measures, including the quality and size of the facility, the extent
to which the curriculum is tailored for each child, and the amount of
time teachers spend evaluating pupils' progress. In Georgia, local
officials can choose from one of several approved assessment
programs, including the High/Scope evaluation tool.
Meanwhile,
school districts in Vermont are conducting school-readiness
screenings of prekindergartners, says Squires, the state's
early-childhood consultant. But the state is urging districts to
conduct
the evaluations in a nonstandardized way. Many local programs are
inviting children in for a "play based" assessment. They enter a
classroom and demonstrate their physical, language, motor, and
cognitive skills while they play with toys, create art, and build
structures.
"We did not want to create an individual assessment or
a group assessment for every child where they were being asked to sit
down and perform specific tasks," Squires says.
The federal Head
Start program is taking a similar approach to complying with the 1998
law that requires every Head Start center to conduct evaluations
based on performance indicators.
While many of the performance
indicators are selected by federal administrators, local centers are
required to do their own evaluations of children in the areas of
language and literacy, mathematics, science, creative arts, social
ability, interest in learning, and physical and motor skills.
The
instruments they use must be validated for the way they're being
applied. For example, a center may not rely on a test intended to
individualize curriculum as part of its program
evaluation.
Programs were collecting such information in various
forms already, whether as part of the disabilities-screening
requirement or their own curriculum planning. What's new to Head
Start programs is tabulating the data to figure out the overall
outcomes of participating children.
"This is—almost in every case—a
new idea," says Thomas Schultz, the director of the program-support
division of the federal Head Start bureau.
For all the activity
aimed at assessing children to ensure that they received the services
they needed or to communicate their abilities to parents, he
says, "it was rare that programs would use that information at a
management level. What we're talking about now is a new
strategy."
Kindergarten: Stakes Rising?
While the
evaluations
conducted throughout early-childhood programs don't carry high stakes
for the children involved, the nature of assessment changes once
children enter kindergarten because of the nationwide goal to have
every child reading at grade level by grade 3.
Still, such
assessments are administered to drive instruction rather than reward
or penalize the child.
Michigan has devised a literacy assessment
in which teachers evaluate a child's reading skills starting in
kindergarten, with monitoring continuing through 3rd grade.
The
one-on-one testing is designed to help teachers formally measure a
child's skills and then determine what help he or she needs to take
the next steps toward independent reading.
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Standards mean nothing if schools
can wiggle around them.
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Standards mean nothing if schools
can wiggle around them.
The state plans to
expand the program so children in the pre-K program take it, too,
says Buch, the Michigan education official.
The New York City
public schools started a similar program—called the Early Childhood
Literacy Assessment System, or ECLAS—in 1999.
The battery of tests
assesses children on a wide range of literacy skills from
kindergarten through 2nd grade.
"It gives a complete knowledge of
where the kids are and what they need for literacy," says Charlie
Soule, the city school official who runs the testing program.
Such
programs can be great tools for helping children reach the goal of
becoming independent readers, according to one reading expert.
In
an evaluation of a California reading program, children in schools
that conducted regular classroom assessments showed better reading
results than those in other schools in the state, says Marilyn J.
Adams, a Harvard University research associate specializing in
reading.
"The best [an assessment] can do for you is say, 'You need
to sit with this child and figure out if he's having trouble with
this dimension,'" Adams says. Once teachers do that, they respond
with individualized instruction.
But such programs also can
eventually become a back door into high-stakes testing, some experts
warn. If a child isn't reading well in the 2nd grade, and the
teachers know that the pupil will face a state reading test in the
3rd grade, they may be tempted to hold the boy or girl back a
grade.
"The literacy assessments," Meisels of the Erikson Institute
says, "are only a problem if they are expected to accomplish more
than they are intended to do—which, at least in the case of the
Michigan profile, is to enhance teaching and learning."
But with
the weight of accountability systems looming and a new emphasis on
academic skills, early-childhood educators may be inclined to rely on
assessments in ways that are unfair to young children, he
adds.
"The pressure for results—both in skills and in
accountability—may force early-childhood programs and administrators
to adopt relatively simplistic methods of teaching and assessing that
are not successful for young children," Meisels says.
