Assessment is a hot topic among educators these days. Questions abound. To assess or not to assess? If we do assess how should it be done? Are paper and pencil tests ever appropriate? Should we use authentic assessments? And, maybe the most difficult question of-How should the results of our assessments be used? This month our topic is assessment, and we are focusing on special populations.  We bring you a variety of articles that help provide answers to some of the questions educators, parents and policy makers have about assessment.

This excerpt from a SERVE document looks at the “big picture” of early childhood assessment and outlines some principles for making assessments appropriate.

Assessing Kindergarten Children: What School Systems Need to Know

Principles for Assessing Kindergarten Children

There are several basic principles for assessing kindergarten children that are widely agreed upon by experts in the field of early childhood education.  These fall into two basic categories: the “shoulds” and the “should nots.”  Based primarily upon the work of the National Education Goals Panel Goal 1 Early Childhood Assessments Resource Group (1998), the principles provide a good foundation upon which school systems can design their wide-scale assessments.

Assessment “Shoulds”

Good assessments of kindergarten students should be consistent with the following principles:

Purpose of the Assessment

Assessment instruments are designed for specific purposes and should only be used for the purpose for which they were designed. Generally, these purposes can be described within the following categories:

•        Screening to “catch” children with suspected disabilities or who are at risk for school failure.  These screenings usually are very quick and provide limited information about a child’s abilities.  They help educators select students for whom additional testing is needed to “rule out” or “rule in” a potential learning problem or a need for specialized services.
  

•       Supporting instruction by providing teachers with information on children’s individual strengths and weaknesses.  Teachers can use this information to plan curriculum activities for the entire class, small groups, or individual children. The purpose of instructional assessment is to improve student achievement by providing information on skills children have so they can plan learning activities geared toward what children already know and what they need to learn. Assessments that are used to improve classroom instruction are usually conducted more than once over a period of time so that the teacher has a comprehensive picture of a child’s skills and abilities in a variety of learning situations, and often are closely related to the curriculum being used in the classroom.
  

•       Accountability assessments provide information on children’s skills and abilities for two general purposes: to track changes in the characteristics of children over time, and to provide data that can be used to evaluate programs. This type of data is often collected when children enter school to help educators and policymakers assess success of early childhood experiences in preparing children for school. Information on children’s abilities in kindergarten can help identify gaps in earlier services and point to improvements in early childhood programs. For instance, an assessment system might collect information on children’s immunizations and determine that the rate of up-to-date immunizations in children entering kindergarten is unacceptably low.  A community could then choose to implement programs to encourage parents to get their children immunized.  In short, accountability data are used to evaluate services and/or monitor trends or changes in child indicators over time.  However, if the purpose of collecting assessment data on children is to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular program, the child assessment data should only be one of many types of data included in the evaluation. Other types of data, such as information on how the program was implemented, should be combined with the child measures to provide an informative program evaluation.

It is useful to think about timeframes for the information being collected to clarify the purpose of the assessment (see Figure 1). Screening information captures information on children’s abilities at the time they enter school so that the information can be used within a short timeframe to determine the need for further evaluations or assessments (in other words, “now”). Classroom instruction assessments are used by teachers to plan classroom activities (or “looking forward”). Accountability or program evaluation assessments provide data to assess children’s previous experiences (“looking back”).

Typically, assessment instruments are designed to address only one of these purposes. It is important that school systems select instruments based upon the purpose for their assessment, and use the information consistently with the purpose for which the assessment instrument was designed.

This is an excerpt from an upcoming SERVE publication, Assessing Kindergarten Children:  What School Systems Need to Know.