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…

Background/Context: The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the way we conduct research. For some modes of data collection, such as interviews, there was a ready (if not perfect) analog: face-to-face became phone-based; paper and pen surveys moved online. Others, such as direct assessments of child development, proved more challenging. Despite the…

Purpose: Analysis of narrative language samples is a recommended clinical practice in the assessment of children's language skills, but we know little about how results from such analyses relate to overall oral language ability across the early school years. We examined the relations between language sample metrics from a short narrative retell,…

This article illustrates and differentiates the unique role cognitive interviews and think-aloud interviews play in developing and validating assessments. Specifically, we describe the use of (a) cognitive interviews to gather empirical evidence to support claims about the intended construct being measured and (b) think-aloud interviews to gather…

Developmental science demonstrates that younger children (ages 4 to 8) are capable of making meaning of their contexts and the self. Yet, younger children's meaning making is largely absent from intervention and implementation research on early childhood policies. This absence is notable given the rise in investment in early childhood policies and…

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…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how well a kindergarten dynamic assessment of decoding predicts future reading difficulty at 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade and to determine whether the dynamic assessment improves the predictive validity of traditional static kindergarten reading measures. Method: With a small variation in sample…

In this study, we reviewed 76 journal articles on employing drawing assessment as a research tool in science education. Findings from the systematic review suggest four justifications for using drawing as a type of research tool, including assessment via drawing as (a) an alternative method considering young participants' verbal or writing…

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…

Few Spanish language tools are available for assessing important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The present study presents evidence of the psychometric properties of a Spanish-language version of SELweb (SELweb-S), a web-based system for assessing children's ability to recognize others' emotions and perspectives, solve social problems,…

This study examined the degrees of congruence between two early childhood evaluation systems on various quality concepts: the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) and Zhejiang's Kindergarten Quality Rating System (KQRS). Analysis of variance and post hoc least significant difference tests were employed to show the extent to…

This paper investigates the power of the computer guided clinical interview (CI) and new curriculum based measurement (CBM) measures to identify and help children at risk of low mathematics achievement. We use data from large numbers of children in Kindergarten through Grade 3 to investigate the construct validity of CBM risk categories. The basic…

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…