List of DAP Assessment Characteristics

From EARLY CHILDHOOD ASSESSMENT: IMPLEMENTING EFFECTIVE PRACTICE- a research-based guide to inform assessment planning in the early grades by Cindy Jiban, Ph.D. (MARCH 2013) APPENDIX: PROFESSIONAL GUIDELINES ON EARLY CHILDHOOD ASSESSMENT

APPENDIX A: NEGP ASSESSMENT PRINCIPLES

National Education Goals Panel (NEGP), 1998, pp. 5-6

• Assessment should bring about benefits for children. Gathering accurate information from young children is difficult and potentially stressful. Formal assessments may also be costly and take resources that could otherwise be spent directly on programs and services for young children. To warrant conducting assessments, there must be a clear benefit—either in direct services to the child or in improved quality.
• Assessments should be tailored to a specific purpose and should be reliable, valid, and fair for that purpose. Assessments designed for one purpose are not necessarily valid if used for other purposes. In the past, many of the abuses of testing with young children have occurred because of misuse. The recommendations in the sections that follow are tailored to specific assessment purposes.
• Assessment policies should be designed recognizing that reliability and validity of assessments increase with children’s age. The younger the child, the more difficult it is to obtain reliable and valid assessment data. It is particularly difficult to assess children’s cognitive abilities accurately before age 6. Because of problems with reliability and validity, some types of assessment should be postponed until children are older, while other types of assessment can be pursued, but only with necessary safeguards.
• Assessments should be age-appropriate in both content and the method of data collection. Assessments of young children should address the full range of early learning and development, including physical well-being and motor development; social and emotional development; approaches toward learning; language development; and cognition and general knowledge. Methods of assessment should recognize that children need familiar contexts in order to be able to demonstrate their abilities. Abstract paper-and-pencil tasks may make it especially difficult for young children to show what they know.
• Assessments should be linguistically appropriate, recognizing that to some extent all assessments are measures of language. Regardless of whether an assessment is intended to measure early reading skills, knowledge of color names, or learning potential, assessment results are easily confounded by language proficiency, especially for children who come from home backgrounds with limited exposure to English, for whom the assessment would essentially be an assessment of their English proficiency. Each child’s first- and second-language development should be taken into account when determining appropriate assessment methods and in interpreting the meaning of assessment results.
• Parents should be a valued source of assessment information, as well as an audience for assessment results. Because of the fallibility of direct measures of young children, assessments should include multiple sources of evidence, especially reports from parents and teachers. Assessment results should be shared with parents as part of an ongoing process that involves parents in their child’s education.

APPENDIX D: NRC GUIDELINES ON PURPOSES OF ASSESSMENT, INSTRUMENT SELECTION AND IMPLEMENTATION, AND SYSTEMS
National Research Council (NRC), 2008, p. 5-12

Guidelines on Purposes of Assessment

• (P-1) Public and private entities undertaking the assessment of young children should make the purposes of assessment explicit and public.
• (P-2) The assessment strategy—which assessments to use, how often to administer them, how long they should be, how the domain of items or children or programs should be sampled—should match the stated purpose and require the minimum amount of time to obtain valid results for that purpose. Even assessments that do not directly involve children, such as classroom observations, teacher rating forms, and collection of work products, impose a burden on adults and will require advance planning for using the information.
• (P-3) Those charged with selecting assessments need to weigh options carefully, considering the appropriateness of candidate assessments for the desired purpose and for use with all the subgroups of children to be included. Although the same measure may be used for more than one purpose, prior consideration of all potential purposes is essential, as is careful analysis of the actual content of the assessment instrument. Direct examination of the assessment items is important because the title of a measure does not always reflect the content.

Guidelines on Instrument Selection and Implementation

• (I-1) Selection of a tool or instrument should always include careful attention to its psychometric properties.
  
  A. Assessment tools should be chosen that have been shown to have acceptable levels of validity and reliability evidence for the purposes for which they will be used and the populations that will be assessed.
  
  B. Those charged with implementing assessment systems need to make sure that procedures are in place to examine validity data as part of instrument selection and then to examine the data being produced with the instrument to ensure that the scores being generated are valid for the purposes for which they are being used.
  
  C. Test developers and others need to collect and make available evidence about the validity of inferences for language and cultural minority groups and for children with disabilities.
  
  D. Program directors, policy makers, and others who select instruments for assessments should receive instruction in how to select and use assessment instruments.
• (I-2) Assessments should not be given without clear plans for follow-up steps that use the information productively and appropriately.
• (I-3) When assessments are carried out, primary caregivers should be informed in advance about their purposes and focus. When assessments are for screening purposes, primary caregivers should be informed promptly about the results, in particular whether they indicate a need for further diagnostic assessment.
• (I-4) Pediatricians, primary medical caregivers, and other qualified personnel should screen for maternal or family factors that might impact child outcomes—child abuse risk, maternal depression, and other factors known to relate to later outcomes.
• (I-5) Screening assessment should be done only when the available instruments are informative and have good predictive validity.
• (I-6) Assessors, teachers, and program administrators should be able to articulate the purpose of assessments to parents and others.
• (I-7) Assessors should be trained to meet a clearly specified level of expertise in administering assessments, should be monitored systematically, and should be reevaluated occasionally. Teachers or other program staff may administer assessments if they are carefully supervised and if reliability checks and monitoring are in place to ensure adherence to approved procedures.
• (I-8) States or other groups selecting high-stakes assessments should leave an audit trail—a public record of the decision making that was part of the design and development of the assessment system. These decisions would include why the assessment data are being collected, why a particular set of outcomes was selected for assessment, why the particular tools were selected, how the results will be reported and to whom, as well as how the assessors were trained and the assessment process was monitored.
• (I-9) For large-scale assessment systems, decisions regarding instrument selection or development for young children should be made by individuals with the requisite programmatic and technical knowledge and after careful consideration of a variety of factors, including existing research, recommended practice, and available resources. Given the broad-based knowledge needed to make such decisions wisely, they cannot be made by a single individual or by fiat in legislation. Policy and legislation should allow for the adoption of new instruments as they are developed and validated.
• (I-10) Assessment tools should be constructed and selected for use in accordance with principles of universal design, so they will be accessible to, valid, and appropriate for the greatest possible number of children. Children with disabilities may still need accommodations, but this need should be minimized.
• (I-11) Extreme caution needs to be exercised in reaching conclusions about the status and progress of, as well as the effectiveness of programs serving, young children with special needs, children from language-minority homes, and other children from groups not well represented in norming or validation samples, until more information about assessment use is available and better measures are developed.

Guidelines on Systems

• (S-1) An effective early childhood assessment system must be part of a larger system with a strong infrastructure to support children’s care and education. The infrastructure is the foundation on which the assessment systems rest and is critical to its smooth and effective functioning. The infrastructure should encompass several components that together form the system:
  
  A. Standards: A comprehensive, well-articulated set of standards for both program quality and children’s learning that are aligned to one another and that define the constructs of interest as well as child outcomes that demonstrate that the learning described in the standard has occurred.
  
  B. Assessments: Multiple approaches to documenting child development and learning and reviewing program quality that are of high quality and connect to one another in well-defined ways, from which strategic selection can be made depending on specific purposes.
  
  C. Reporting: Maintenance of an integrated database of assessment instruments and results (with appropriate safeguards of confidentiality) that is accessible to potential users, that provides information about how the instruments and scores relate to standards, and that can generate reports for varied audiences and purposes.
  
  D. Professional development: Ongoing opportunities provided to those at all levels (policy makers, program directors, assessment administrators, practitioners) to understand the standards and the assessments and to learn to use the data and data reports with integrity for their own purposes.
  
  E. Opportunity to learn: Procedures to assess whether the environments in which children are spending time offer high-quality support for development and learning, as well as safety, enjoyment, and affectively positive relationships, and to direct support to those that fall short.
  
  F. Inclusion: Methods and procedures for ensuring that all children served by the program will be assessed fairly, regardless of their language, culture, or disabilities, and with tools that provide useful information for fostering their development and learning.
  
  G. Resources: The assurance that the financial resources needed to ensure the development and implementation of the system components will be available.
  
  H. Monitoring and evaluation: Continuous monitoring of the system itself to ensure that it is operating effectively and that all elements are working together to serve the interests of the children. This entire infrastructure must be in place to create and sustain an assessment subsystem within a larger system of early childhood care and education.
• (S-2) A successful system of assessments must be coherent in a variety of ways. It should be horizontally coherent, with the curriculum, instruction, and assessment all aligned with the early learning and development standards and with the program standards, targeting the same goals for learning, and working together to support children’s developing knowledge and skill across all domains. It should be vertically coherent, with a shared understanding at all levels of the system of the goals for children’s learning and development that underlie the standards, as well as consensus about the purposes and uses of assessment. It should be developmentally coherent, taking into account what is known about how children’s skills and understanding develop over time and the content knowledge, abilities, and understanding that are needed for learning to progress at each stage of the process. The California Desired Results Developmental Profile provides an example of movement toward a multiply coherent system. These coherences drive the design of all the subsystems. For example, the development of early learning standards, curriculum, and the design of teaching practices and assessments should be guided by the same framework for understanding what is being attempted in the classroom that informs the training of beginning teachers and the continuing professional development of experienced teachers. The reporting of assessment results to parents, teachers, and other stakeholders should also be based on this same framework, as should the evaluations of effectiveness built into all systems. Each child should have an equivalent opportunity to achieve the defined goals, and the allocation of resources should reflect those goals.
• (S-3) Following the best possible assessment practices is especially crucial in cases in which assessment can have significant consequences for children, teachers, or programs. The 1999 NRC report High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation urged extreme caution in basing high-stakes decisions on assessment outcomes, and we conclude that even more extreme caution is needed when dealing with young children from birth to age 5 and with the early care and education system. We emphasize that a primary purpose of assessing children or classrooms is to improve the quality of early childhood care and education by identifying where more support, professional development, or funding is needed and by providing classroom personnel with tools to track children’s growth and adjust instruction.
• (S-4) Accountability is another important purpose for assessment, especially when significant state or federal investments are made in early childhood programs. Program level accountability should involve high stakes only under very well-defined conditions: (a) data about input factors are fully taken into account, (b) quality rating systems or other program quality information has been considered in conjunction with child measures, (c) the programs have been provided with all the supports needed to improve, and (d) it is clear that restructuring or shutting the program down will not have worse consequences for children than leaving it open. Similarly, high stakes for teachers should not be imposed on the basis of classroom functioning or child outcomes alone. Information about access to resources and support for teachers should be gathered and carefully considered in all such decisions, because sanctioning teachers for the failure of the system to support them is inappropriate.
• (S-5) Performance (classroom-based) assessments of children can be used for accountability, if objectivity is ensured by checking a sample of the assessments for reliability and consistency, if the results are appropriately contextualized in information about the program, and if careful safeguards are in place to prevent misuse of information.
• (S-6) Minimizing the burdens of assessment is an important goal; being clear about purpose and embedding any individual assessment decision into a larger system can limit the time and money invested in assessment.
• (S-7) It is important to establish a common way of identifying children for services across the early care and education, family support, health, and welfare sectors.
• (S-8) Implementing assessment procedures requires skilled administrators who have been carefully trained in the assessment procedures to be implemented; because direct assessments with young children can be particularly challenging, more training may be required for such assessments.
• (S-9) Implementation of a system-level approach requires having services available to meet the needs of all children identified through screening, as well as requiring follow-up with more in- depth assessments.
• (S-10) If services are not available, it can be appropriate to use screening assessments and then use the results to argue for expansion of services. Failure to screen when services are not available may lead to underestimation of the need for services. Assessment tools are authentic.

Early Childhood Assessment: Implementing Effective Practice