Assessment tools are one way that early educators systematically collect information about their children. These tools help educators to understand what skills their children have mastered, make choices about appropriate lesson plans or other activities, and consider where on the developmental continuum their children fall, among other things. Early educators spend a great deal of time with their children, and they develop invaluable knowledge of their children’s personalities, backgrounds, interests and skills. At the same time, the systematic nature of assessments means that educators can generally have increased confidence in judgements based on assessment data, compared to judgements based solely on everyday interactions with children. In 2003, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education (NAECS/SDE) adopted a position statement on curriculum, assessment, and program evaluation that says early educators have a “responsibility to make ethical, appropriate, valid, and reliable assessment a central part of all early childhood programs” (NAEYC & NAECS/SDE, 2003).
All assessments, however, are not created equal. Different types of assessments are more or less well-suited to specific tasks. For example, an observational measure allows an educator to spend a lot of time observing a child and directs an educator to focus on various aspects of development and ultimately make a judgement about each child’s skills and areas for growth. This type of assessment can help an educator get to know a child and provide information that can inform lesson planning and class activities. At the same time, an observational measure may pose problems for program evaluation since even with the highest level of training, educator observations are subjective and should not be used to make comparisons across classrooms. Likewise, observational measures and other teacher ratings are not appropriate for use when making high stakes decisions, where direct assessments administered by trained, objective assessors are most appropriate (see Waterman, McDermott, Fantuzzo, and Gadsden, 2012).
Regardless of the purpose of the assessment, it is important that decision-makers consider the reliability and validity of the assessment scores. Reliability refers to how consistent the measure is in terms of time, the assessment’s questions or tasks, and/or the raters involved in scoring of the assessment. For example, is there evidence that different assessors (or the same assessor over time) rate the same child similarly? Validity refers to how well the assessment measures the things it intends to measure. One way of assessing this is to test whether the measure correlates with other measures with which we’d expect it correlate. Furthermore, validity is concerned with whether the inferences made based on assessment scores are appropriate.
In using assessment scores to make decisions, the higher the stakes of the decision being made, the more important it is that the assessment demonstrate strong evidence of the assessment’s reliability and validity. For example, when using assessment scores to place students in programs or determine eligibility for services, only assessments with substantial evidence of reliability and validity should be used. Other considerations when choosing an assessment include the mode of assessment administration (for example, tablet, easel, computer), expense of the assessment, and burden on educators and children. A thorough examination of important properties of assessments and considerations for their use is covered in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing developed by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education (2014).
In one of the initial research studies funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, PEER examined the use of assessment in early childhood settings across PEER communities. In this study, PEER invited lead early childhood educators from selected district-based and community-based classrooms to participate in a survey about how they use assessment in their classrooms. Although the sample was small, preliminary findings shed light on the diversity of assessments used in PEER communities and the purposes for which they are used. The next steps in this study are to examine the match between intended assessment purpose and reported assessment use. The use of assessment data to understand the experiences of young learners is a topic of great interest for PEER communities, and PEER looks forward to continued collaboration with its stakeholders on this topic.