CONNECT WITH US:

Data-Driven Storytellers for the Education Market

WHAT'S GETTING ATTENTION IN THE INDUSTRY
Measuring More than Fun

Measuring More than Fun

Source:Language-Magazine

Educators still have much to learn about setting preschool children up for later academic success. Well-designed and fun measurements of their skills can light the path forward.

 

By Dr. Scott McConnell

Assessing the learning and developmental progress of preschool children poses unique challenges, but by focusing on general outcome measurements with assessments that are fun to take, we can provide better support for individual students and also learn how to better prepare all students for academic success in their K–12 careers and beyond.

Curriculum-based measurements (CBMs) are a broad class of tools developed over the last 40 years to help teachers identify children who are not meeting academic expectations and then to monitor the interventions those students are receiving to see if they're improving their trajectory towards later success. CBMs are part of a broader class of “General Outcome Measures” that share a handful of common characteristics.

Advantages of General Outcome Measures

First, General Outcome Measures, or GOMs, are very brief and easy to administer. It doesn't take a lot of training or extra materials. Second, they meet all of our standards for psychometric rigor—the trustworthiness and meaningfulness we require. If two different teachers administer the assessment, they should get the same scores. In addition, the measures are related to important outcomes for kids, both the things we expect the child to be doing today and more long-term outcomes. Third, general outcome measures can be administered often, because to monitor progress we must be able to come back and assess students on a relatively frequent basis. We design CBMs so that they can be done every couple of weeks, or even more often.

For concurrent or short-term outcomes, teachers sometimes prepare or select measures that are very skills-specific and useful for monitoring particular content they’re teaching kids. For instance, teachers may have students complete “checkpoint” assessments to be certain they have mastered recently taught simple addition facts or unit tests to monitor children’s understanding of science lessons. That's an important piece of information for instructional planning, but it's not necessarily great for predicting long-term outcomes and objectives. For that kind of assessment, we want a “moving picture” of the child’s growing skill in a broad domain like mathematics or oral language. CBMs are designed to provide that picture of growth.

When we look at preschool-age children and their longer-term literacy objectives, the question becomes, “What are we doing for four-year-olds to help them become successful readers?” They aren't readers as four-year-olds. Indeed, that's not our goal. Instead, our goal is to give preschoolers the skills and experiences so that, once formal reading instruction begins, those children are great candidates for taking up the benefits of that instruction and demonstrating competency.

In early literacy development, we want students to be able to have strong oral language skills, be able to hear and “play with” the sounds in words (things like rhyming and alliterating), and to begin to understand how words are represented in print. Those are the building blocks that we're interested in, but rather than assessing the specific building blocks individually, a curriculum-based measure or general outcome measure takes a more holistic approach and looks at students’ abilities to use all of those things in concert to produce skillful performance.

Read more on page 19...