Measuring School Readiness as the Intersection of Policy, Practice, and Research

• In Event: 46.031 - The Intersecting Roles of Policy, Practice, and Research in Adopting a Statewide Kindergarten Readiness Assessment

Abstract

1. To describe the process used in Illinois for making policy decisions, informed by teacher feedback and the research literature, for measuring school readiness with a research-based child development assessment.

2. One of the primary goals of the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS), established by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and the KIDS advisory committee, was to identify gaps in school readiness. The KIDS instrument is both a formative and summative assessment: formative in that it supports teachers’ ongoing curriculum planning and administrators’ support of teachers to implement KIDS, and summative in that aggregate statewide results provide ISBE with information about children’s readiness to learn at the beginning and end of kindergarten.

3. Illinois’ statewide kindergarten assessment system, the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS), provides progressions of learning and development that span the kindergarten year across several developmental domains. The KIDS instrument is aligned to early learning, kindergarten, and first grade content standards, and includes the following 11 domains: Approaches to Learning – Self-Regulation, Social and Emotional Development, Language and Literacy Development, English Language Development, Language and Literacy Development in Spanish, Cognition: Math, Cognition: Science, Physical Development, Health, History-Social Science, and Visual and Performing Arts.

4. A desired outcome of the KIDS pilot implementation was to determine the domains to be completed at each rating period. A prominent concern was balancing the data collection burden for teachers with the desire to have information about children’s learning and development across each of the 11 domains. Teacher feedback was gathered through online surveys. Specifically, kindergarten teachers were asked multiple questions to determine how they defined “readiness” at the beginning of kindergarten and the beginning of first grade, what areas of readiness that they felt were most essential, which areas they would prioritize assessing, what it means for them for children to be “ready to learn,” when they emphasize each developmental domain in their curriculum, and what other assessments they already complete in each learning area.

5.Feedback survey results were triangulated across the various related survey items to provide recommendations to guide ISBE’s decisions about the domains to be completed during each of three KIDS rating periods each year. Overall, results indicated that kindergarten teachers defined “readiness” differently for the beginning of kindergarten than for the end of kindergarten. The majority of teachers reported emphasizing learning in all domains throughout the kindergarten year, though some domains were emphasized more in the fall, and others were emphasized more in the spring.

6. The results of feedback from kindergarten teachers in Illinois, as well as the process for gathering their feedback, enabled the state education agency to make implementation policy decisions that provide coverage across all content standards, alleviate assessment burden, and be responsive to input from teachers. This approach could inform other states who are working toward implementing a similar comprehensive, statewide, standards-aligned, school readiness assessment.

Authors

• Kerry Kriener-Althen, WestEd

• Reyna P. Hernandez, Illinois State Board of Education