Early Childhood Landscape TodayIssues and Insights

Mathina Calliope

Northwest Evaluation Association

Before we start … some words and phrases

• Controversy

• Emergent reader

• Kindergarten readiness

• Early Learning Challenge Grant

• Growth

• Comprehensive assessment system

Agenda

• Anticipatory set

• Early childhood definitions

• Controversies in the field

• Leverage of early intervention

• Whole-child approaches

• What assessment should look like

• NWEA’s offerings

Anticipatory Set

In which domains should young children be assessed?

• Social, emotional, physical, cognitive

Defining early childhood, defining early childhood education

Statement #2: Early childhood education includes infancy.

• Discuss with your tablemates.

Definitions• “Early childhood” equals birth to age eight (NAEYC).

• This includes grade 3!

• Education includes care of children• Play, nap, eat … all contribute to child’s development

• Feds require special education services starting at birth

Controversies

Statements #1 and #5

• Discuss with your tablemates:

• 1 - Standardized testing is NOT appropriate for children 5 years old or younger.

• 5 - It is appropriate to set standards for social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development for children from birth through age 5.

Controversies:What is normal?

“Very young children learn and grow at remarkable and unpredictable rates that are unmatched during other age periods. Because of this, scores from assessments administered to very young children tend to be unstable.” –Division for Early Childhood

Controversies:Two key topics in early childhood

1. Developmentally appropriate practice

2. Opportunity to learn

Statements #3 and #4

• Discuss with your tablemates:

• 3 – The Common Core State Standards require that students be able to read by the end of kindergarten.

• 4 – Having early childhood standards for literacy and numeracy is turning kindergarten into the new first grade.

Controversies:Standards: What is measured becomes (all) that which is taught?

• Alliance for Childhood opposition letter to Common Core: “Didactic instruction and testing will crowd out other important areas of learning.”

• Is Kindergarten the new first grade?

Emergent-reader texts

• Strong picture support

• Carefully controlled text

• Repetitive patterns

• Controlled, repeated vocabulary

• Natural language

• Large print

• Wide letter spacing

• Familiar concepts

• Limited text on a page

From The Measured Mom

Controversies:Methodology

• Standards are not pedagogy.

Controversies:How to assess, why to assess

• Documentary assessment

• Multiple forms of evidence, including standardized testing

• Consequential validity

Leverage of early intervention

Discuss

• What program(s) does your district use to identify and intervene in the early years?

Powerful stuff

• Reduce achievement gaps

• Reduce academic disability

• Reduce drop-out rates

Economic wisdom of investing in early intervention• Rand study (2005): RoI of $1.80 to as much as $17.07 for every dollar spent

• Standout kindergarten teachers worth $320,000 year based on “additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers (Leonhardt, 2010)

• Increased graduation rates and decreased special education placement rates (Chicago Longitudinal Study)

• Improved performance on standardized tests in later schooling and decreased chances of grade retention (Yale University Child Study Center)

• Lower rates of teen pregnancy (The Carolina Abecedarian Project)

• Higher employment rates and higher wages as adults (The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project)

A clear case for early literacy

• “[B]y the end of first grade and beginning of second grade, students on low developmental reading trajectories face nearly insurmountable obstacles to catching up with their peers. The answer lies in the early identification of children with deficits in crucial early literacy skills and enhancing their acquisition of those skills.” (Good, Simmons, and Smith, 1998)

A clear case for early literacy

• Prevent disabilities

• Close achievement gap

Whole child… play-based instruction

Sesame Street

• Math

• Keyboarding

• Phonemic awareness

Play-based versus direct-instruction preschool

• HighScope’s Preschool Curriculum Comparison Study

• Direct instruction model

• Traditional nursery school model

• HighScope model

High/Scope Results

• 47% of direct-instruction group had needed treatment for emotional impairment or disturbance, versus only 6% in other two groups

• By age 23, higher rates of arrests for felony offenses (34%) among direct-instruction group members versus play-based program members (9%)

Multiple domains to develop

• Language

• Physical

• Social/emotional

• Cognitive

Play

• “Children learn that real things can be represented by symbols when they play and use hands-on materials.” (Alliance for Childhood, 2015)

• Lots of life experiences prepare children to encounter in print descriptions of farms, shopping centers, etc.

• “[P]lay promotes key abilities that enable children to learn successfully. In high-level dramatic play, for example, the collaborative planning of roles and scenarios and the impulse control required to stay within the play’s constraints develop children’s self-regulation, symbolic thinking, memory, and language—capacities critical to later learning, social competence, and school success.” (NAEYC, 2009)

Family involvement

• Early childhood education includes supporting families.

What should assessment look like?

Developmentally appropriate

• Large-group setting, paper-pencil administration is not suited for young children for obvious reasons.

• Direct assessment

• Observational measures

Standardized

• Word has a negative connotation, but of course all it really means is that “an assessment is administered in the same way each time it is administered (regardless of who is delivering and who is responding to the assessment)” (Snow, 2011).

Designed and used for its purpose

• Support instruction?

• Identify students with special needs?

• Evaluate program?

• Make high-stakes decisions?

• …training

Directly benefitting children

• Assessments should optimize learning.

• There needs to be a demonstrably positive effect of the assessment.

Given over time

• “A one-time snapshot of a child … cannot capture all of the cumulative experiences in programs, in the home, and in the community of a young child from birth to that day” (Snow, 2011).

Part of a system

• Education program goals overall

• Assessment program goals

NWEA’s Early Learning Offerings

Overview

• MAP for Primary Grades (MPG)• Assessments

• Common Core

• The New Learning Continuum

• MPG as a Universal Screener

• Children’s Progress Academic Assessment (CPAA)• Overview

• Spanish Version

MPG AssessmentsScreening Tests

• Structure of the tests – semi adaptive• Early Literacy

• Early Numeracy

• Purpose• To get baseline information about prekindergarten and

kindergarten students’ foundational skill knowledge

MPG AssessmentsScreening Tests

• Data teachers receive• Reports broken down by skill• Scores in percent correct (see examples on next slides, items are not

on the RIT scale)

• Teachers use the data to…• Determine areas where instruction might be needed• Determine which skills checklist test to give

• Frequency• Can be administered outside of a test window (unlike Survey with

Goals), so teachers can give them whenever it is instructionally useful• Tests are fixed form so be mindful of this for multiple administrations

MPG Assessments Skills Checklist Tests

• Structure of the tests• 10 reading assessments in phonological awareness and phonics

• 28 math assessments in computation and number sense• Most tests stop after 10 items if student hasn’t gotten 60% correct

• Purpose

• Dig deeper on skills from the Screening and/or Survey with Goals tests

• Data teachers receive• Reports broken down by skill • Scores in percent correct (items are not on the RIT scale)

MPG Assessments Skills Checklist Tests

Teachers use the data to…• Determine areas where instruction might be needed

Frequency• Can be administered outside of a test window (unlike Survey with Goals),

so teacher can give them whenever it is instructionally useful• Tests are fixed form so be mindful of this for multiple administrations

MPG Assessments Survey with Goals Tests

• Purpose

• Growth measure

• Data teachers receive

• Overall RIT score

• Goal area scores, just like MAP

• Teachers use the data to…

• help determine what kids are ready to learn

• group kids for instruction (based on Instructional Resources and PGID)

• Frequency• Up to 3 times a year

MPG Assessments Survey with Goals Tests

Versions• Original, NWEA version

• Common Core

• Common Core State versions

• Alaska

• Indiana

• Texas

• Virginia

MPG-Common Core

Considerations for Assessing Early Learners

• Engagement – Technology enhanced items

• Audio is necessary to assess certain skills (e.g., phonological awareness)

• Precursor skills not explicitly stated in the CCSS are included anyway, because we know teachers are still teaching them. Examples:

• Math• Identifying and counting coins• Measurement Tools

• Reading• Fact and Opinion

How did we create Common Core Tests for MPG?

• Immersed ourselves in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We utilized available resources to facilitate understanding of the intent of the standards

• Identified Common Core Standards that can be assessed in a Computer-Adaptive Test

• Created the structure of the test based on the structure of the K-3 CCSS

• Hand alignment of MPG items to CCSS

• Placement of items in the test is determined by alignment of standards to the goal structure

• Continual evaluation of need based on the coverage of

standards with items in the MPG pool

Depth of Knowledge

• Education is abuzz with DoK

• Challenges in assessing DoK 2 and 3

• Very little information out there about how DoK applies to Early Learning so we are using our professional judgment about the DoK levels of our items

NWEA Fluency Assessment … future

• Early prototyping

• Present fluency assessments are time consuming since they’re individually administered by teachers, they require that teachers often make a judgment call, which reduces standardization, and then teachers have to enter information into a computer.

• Our version: speech-capture software

• Computer administered; diagnostic report created

• Want to know more? Mike Nesterak mike.nesterak@nwea.org