Research Focus - Formal Assessment in Early Childhood

Throughout this course we are required to choose a research topic.  I chose the topic, "How to perform formal assessments in early childhood".  This has been something I have been struggling with over the past few years within my own center.  As a director, evaluating the program to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses is a top priority.  Our primary objective is kindergarten readiness, so the best way to determine program quality is through the analysis of student achievement.  This process involves initially testing children for prior knowledge, performing assessments throughout the year, and then re-evaluating at the end of the year through a formal assessment to determine the knowledge the children have gained throughout the year in comparison to what they already knew.

Each year I work with my faculty to develop a pretest, mid-year evaluations, and a year-end assessment. Every year we improve this process through revising the tests and administering them in different ways.  It is always a challenge.  This year we still administered our own pretest, but decided to adopt the progress reporting system developed by the state of Florida to coincide with the learning standards developed for 

four year-olds.  In our opinion, there are still changes that need to be made.  

I believe the art of assessing early childhood students is yet to be discovered.  It's not as simple as giving them a scantron and asking them to fill in the bubbles.  Children who learn through play must demonstrate their knowledge in the same fashion.  I am excited about researching this topic, but more importantly, I feel secure in having the guidance and support of my instructor and colleagues in learning HOW to do this research.  As I mentioned, I have been digging around in this topic for the past several years in an attempt to create the perfect assessments.  It has been extremely overwhelming.  It seems I always begin researching and give up because I am inundated with information overload.  I would welcome any advice or resources in this area as I begin my journey.  If you have answers to the following questions, please feel free to share!

• Do you feel the pre-test and post-test should be the same in order to compare then/now results?
• Do you feel children should be separated from the classroom and taken into a private environment to be tested, or should they remain in the classroom setting among peers?
• Should parents be provided with their children's results in conjunction with where they rank in their group of peers (not revealing identities of course)?
• Do any of you have a valuable resource or tool you are currently utilizing to assess 3 / 4 year olds?

I am looking forward to this journey and am exciting to hear about your topics!  Happy researching to all!