There is considerable research regarding measures of early reading but much less in early writing. Nevertheless, writing is a critical skill for success in school and early difficulties in writing are likely to persist without intervention. A necessary step toward identifying those students who need additional support is the use of screening…

Motivation impacts student academic performance. A performance task to directly assess writing motivation in young children is needed. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the validity of the Writing Challenge Task (WCT), a task-oriented assessment created to measure writing motivation with 106 kindergarten students in the rural…

The Child Observation Record (COR), initially developed in 1993 by HighScope Educational Research Foundation, is an observation-based instrument that provides systematic assessment of young children's knowledge and abilities in all major areas of development. Teachers or caregivers spend a few minutes each day writing brief notes or…

The early childhood sector in Singapore has witnessed vast changes in the past two decades. One of the key policy aims is to improve classroom quality. To ensure a rigorous evaluation of the quality of early childhood environments in Singapore, it is important to determine whether commonly used assessments of quality are valid indicators across…

It is difficult to get a good grasp of the topic of kindergarten entry assessment because there are such great differences in the purpose for the instruments, how they are constructed, and how the data is used. Even so, in many states and communities, there is cause for concern. Until the paradigm of education moves from a preoccupation with…

Measures of teaching are used internationally to understand and improve quality in early education with little consideration for ecological validity. In this study, we analyze videos gathered in 58 K-1 classrooms in Central Mexico to evaluate the validity and reliability of scores from an observational tool developed in the U.S. and used…

Over the past 8 years, U.S. kindergarten classrooms have been impacted by policies mandating or recommending the administration of a specific kindergarten entry assessment (KEA) in the initial months of school as well as the increasing reliance on digital technology in the form of mobile apps, touchscreen devices, and online data platforms. Using…

The present study examined the technical adequacy of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) measure of early numeracy for kindergarten through third grade students. Our CBM measures were developed to reflect broad and theoretically derived categories of mathematical thinking: quick retrieval, written computation, and number sense. The mastery of these…

The researcher evaluated the RtI framework of kindergarten (n = 686) and first grade (n = 592) students in a rural school district by assessing the accuracy of the universal screening method, monitoring the rate of improvement (ROI) in the tier groups, comparing the number of special education referrals, and determining the success rate of the…

In developing attitudinal instruments for young children, researchers, program evaluators, and clinicians often use response scales with pictures or images (e.g., smiley faces) as anchors. This article considers connections between word-based and picture based Likert scales and highlights the value in translating conventions used in word-based…

Background: Many in education argue for the importance of incorporating teacher judgements in the assessment and reporting of student performance. Advocates of such an approach are cognisant, though, that obtaining a satisfactory level of consistency in teacher judgements poses a challenge. Purpose: This study investigates the extent to which the…

The identification of children at-risk for reading problems can be costly and time-consuming. Previous research has indicated that teachers are relatively accurate in assessing children's overall reading ability. This study investigated the accuracy of kindergarten and first grade teacher rating scales in predicting children's reading…

The aim of the 2018 International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) conference was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There have been advances in both cognitive…

Research Findings: This study examined the validity and reliability of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; R. C. Pianta, K. M. La Paro, & B. K. Hamre, 2008) in Finnish kindergartens. A pair of trained observers used the CLASS to observe 49 kindergarten teachers (47 female, 2 male) on two different days. Questionnaires measuring…

Research Findings: An effective quality rating system will lead to quality assurance and improvement of early childhood education programs. Many studies have been conducted to examine the validity of quality rating instruments in Western countries, but few have been done in China. The present study investigated the effectiveness of the Beijing…