Closing gaps before they widen: Achieving Foundational Learning through a practical, (in)formative and teacher-administered school readiness measure

• In Event: Making Educational Change Work: Bureaucratic Effectiveness, Leadership, and Teacher Practice in Improving Learning Outcomes

Proposal

Around the world, the skills that children have at the time of entering school are the foundation that their journey through education is built on. These skills can be known as school readiness and are part of an established research base that links children’s attainment at this early stage to later educational outcomes (OECD, 2017). This is reflected in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2.1, which links the quality of early learning with children’s readiness for education and their later attainment in Foundational Learning (SDG 4.1). As such, school readiness represents an important entry point in supporting countries efforts towards SDG 4.1, closing gaps before they widen as the foundation to Foundational Learning.
However, data from majority world countries suggest that many children start school with poor readiness skills (UNESCO, 2017). Measuring children’s starting points is therefore a key tool in contextualising countries’ progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4.1, particularly for understanding countries’ baselines (Sosu and Pimenta, 2023). Such measurement also underpins a multitude of evidence-informed initiatives and interventions to ensure that children are ready for school, for example, UNICEF’s Mozambique Accelerated School Readiness Programme or GPEKIX’s School Readiness Initiative in Uganda and Zambia.
Thus, existing measurement tools have proved invaluable in producing data to enable such insights into the state of school readiness in the Global South, usefully highlighting the importance of psychometrically validated instruments that align with national monitoring systems. Yet, such instruments can be complex and require comprehensive training before delivery. Such complexity can limit their accessibility for practitioners at the classroom level and thus their use beyond collecting data for international reporting and benchmarking. This significantly limits the opportunity for teachers to gain immediate insights into the readiness of their students as information from the tool is taken out of the learning context, creating a division between data reporting and use.
To counter this division, this paper presents the case for a school readiness assessment that can simultaneously provide insights at the individual and classroom-level of teaching and learning alongside valid data that can monitor national level achievement and progress and inform system and policy directions. This embodies an alternative pathway to Foundational Learning, by not only measuring early skills but providing usable insights for classroom practitioners to build on. As such, practitioners are empowered with data to inform their teaching at the earliest opportunity, supporting them to identify and close gaps before they widen.
Reflecting on our ongoing empirical work to measure early childhood learning, evidence suggests that challenges come from standardising interactive and practical assessments for young children, supporting practitioners’ consistent delivery across settings and developing user-friendly outputs that inform teaching and learning. This paper presents possible solutions rooted in assessment design and methodology. These solutions are informed by our on-going research on design and use of Global South learning assessments, our development of a standardised practitioner-administered baseline measure that has assessed over 500,000 children each year since 2021, and the trialling of various item types throughout the assessment development process. These insights will be of interest across different audiences, from policy makers and assessment developers to technical partners who utilise school readiness assessments in the Global South.

Authors

• Tara S Paxman, NFER

• Pei-tseng Jenny Hsieh, National Foundation for Educational Research