DRDPtech: Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP) Online Assessment System

• In Event: Desired Results Developmental Profile Assessment System: Supporting Early Education Programs in California

Abstract

Objectives of the presentation:
Describe the research undertaken on behalf of the California Department of Education’s Child Development Division (CDD) to develop and implement DRDPtechTM an internet-based education-technology system to support teachers and program administrators in CDD-funded early care and education programs in 1. Conducting DRDP© (2010) assessment of the children in their care and 2. Reporting, interpreting, and sharing DRDP© results. DRDPtechTM is currently offered to individual CDD-funded agencies to be hosted by the agencies themselves for the benefit of the agencies’ own teachers and programs. Thus, agencies’ autonomy and control of their own DRDP© assessment data are supported.

Theoretical framework:
Usability and implementation studies focused on the DRDPtechTM application’s ease of use by and benefits for teachers and other program staff, and on the ease of the application’s installation and maintenance on servers hosted by program technology staff. DRDPtechTM reports are based on quantitative IRT calibrations of the DRDP© scales for separate developmental domains, used to display progress across the qualitative levels of development unique to each domain.

Methods:
Usability studies, installation studies, and education-technology training procedures were conducted in field trials with personnel at 12 agencies throughout California who installed DRDPtechTM. Teachers and program staff were trained on live instances of DRDPtechTM with simulated data. These instances were created separately for each participating agency to allow staff to familiarize themselves with all the functionality of the application in an environment that would allow them to learn before needing to input and work with real data.

Data sources:
The data obtained from interviews with users and from providing technical support both to users and to technology staff were used to refine functionality, design new features, and improve data-base management and ease of installation. Usability studies included surveys and feedback forms that were used to accomplish these same goals. DRDPtechTM also utilizes the quantitative assessment data collected by teachers for its psychogenetic reports.

Results:
Studies document the evolution of DRDPtechTM as an education technology resource that has become increasingly beneficial and easy to use for teachers and program staff, and easier to install and maintain for agency technology staff. Specific refinements to the interface, additional features suggested by users for reporting results and for administering user accounts will be shown. Examples include user-suggested refinements to make it easier to set up assessments at the beginning of each new assessment period for children continuing from the previous period and for new children.

Significance:
The delivery into programs of state-supported education-technology for collecting, archiving, reporting, and interpreting DRDP© assessment information currently provides benefit to the agencies who provide it to their teachers in terms of support of instruction, curriculum planning, and program improvement. There is also a potential benefit to the future of Early Childhood Education in general. Benefits include reporting of assessment results as psychometric measurement for the separate domains covered by the California’s Learning and Development Foundations—both as developmental profiles across multiple domains at one point in time and as reports of progress over multiple assessment periods.

Authors

• Stephen M. Moore, University of California - Berkeley

• Richard Vorp, University of California - Berkeley

• Mark R. Wilson, University of California - Berkeley