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Towards More Equitable Early Learning Assessments: A Case Study of the Quick Interactive Language Screener

Sat, March 25, 8:15 to 9:45am, Salt Palace Convention Center, Floor: 3, Meeting Room 355 A

Abstract

Understanding the skills and knowledge that young children bring to early education programs is foundational for tailoring instruction, identifying children’s need for specific supports, and evaluating the impact of educational programs. However, early educators often lack access to accurate and timely information on children’s abilities across developmental domains (Hsueh, 2021). This is particularly true for educators working with multilingual learners, as most assessments were developed primarily with and for White, monolingual English-speaking populations and thus fail to capture the complexity of children’s skills across cultures and languages (Hanno, 2022; Peña & Halle, 2011). In this paper, we will introduce a framework developed in partnership with early childhood families, educators, decisionmakers, and academic leaders that outlines five key features of early learning assessments that produce useful, unbiased, and high-quality information on young children’s skills. We will then apply this framework to evaluate the (1) content, (2) psychometric validity, (3) experience, (4) usefulness, and (5) scalability of the Quick Interactive Language Screener (QUILS; Golinkoff et al., 2021) and Quick Interactive Language Screener: English-Spanish (QUILS:ES; de Villiers et al., 2021; Iglesias et al., 2021), a recently-created measure of children’s language designed in alignment with many of these principles.

Information on the QUILS and QUILS:ES come from the Variations in Implementation of Quality Interventions (VIQI) Project, a multi-site randomized controlled trial of two classroom quality interventions in 130 centers across 10 localities in the United States during the 2021-2022 school year. The study involved 3,378 consented children who were on average 3.56 years old (SD = 0.69). Slightly over half of these children were female (51.70%). Children were racially and ethnically diverse (37.66% Black, 51.37% White, and 10.97% other/multiracial; 41.70% Latinx and nearly half came from a household earning an income below the federal poverty line (44.23%). In this paper, we focus on data collected via direct assessments with a subsample of consented children in Spring 2022. Children were assigned to receive the QUILS or QUILS:ES dependent on a home language screener. Any child who spoke Spanish received the QUILS:ES, whereas children speaking only English or another non-Spanish language received the QUILS. Both the QUILS and QUILS:ES evaluate children’s vocabulary, syntax, and language processing skills through tablet-based items in which children listen to a prompt and must select the correct answer from several options. Children taking the QUILS respond to 48 items, whereas children taking the QUILS:ES respond to a total of 90 items - 45 items in English (unique from those on the QUILS) and 45 items in Spanish. The QUILS application generates a variety of scores from these items, including raw, percentile, and standardized scores.

Table 1 describes the five equitable assessment principles outlined in the framework with example guiding questions used to evaluate the QUILS and QUILS:ES application in VIQI. The final presentation will include evidence from the QUILS and QUILS:ES in response to several of these questions, as well as surface opportunities for further innovation and improvement in the measurement of children’s language skills, particularly among multilanguage learner populations.

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