pre-school accountability and DRDP

[PJ Hallam <pjhallam@berkeley.edu>]

My colleagues at BEAR work with the CA Dept. of Education on an 
excellent early childhood assessment called Desired Results, 
Developmental Profile (DRDP).
http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/desiredresults.asp
It incorporates the essential attributes Dr. Meisels highlights in this 
chapter.  Indeed, his work informed DRDP's creation.  It is not high 
stakes; it is student-focused, along with parents and teachers, and 
should be supported as widely as possible.   PJH

http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/desiredresults.asp

George Sheridan wrote:

> At 10:38 AM 3/17/2006 -0500, Monty Neill wrote:
>
> > Sam Meisels of the Erikson Institute just sent me an email:
> > In my continuing efforts to bring some sanity to this field, I've 
> > finished another chapter on early childhood accountability. If you'd 
> > like to see it or tell others about it, you can find it on our website:
> >  
> > http://www.erikson.edu/files/nonimages/opmeisels2006.pdf
> >  
> > I have not yet read it.
>
>
>
> Meisels is a well-respected scholar and his conclusions will be 
> important in designing accountability systems for public preschools - 
> a significant issue if California voters enact the Reiner Initiative 
> for Universal Preschool this June. The following paragraphs are 
> excerpted from the Executive Summary.
>
> *
>
> How did a testing approach originally developed for middle-and high- 
> schoolers come to be applied to very young children? Are the results 
> of such tests reliable, and if they are, can a narrow range of 
> information about a single child at a particular time be used to 
> evaluate teaching or curriculum? In this paper, written as a chapter 
> in the forthcoming School Readiness, Early Learning, and the 
> Transition to Kindergarten (R.C.Pianta et al.,Eds.), Samuel J.Meisels 
> examines the genesis of accountability testing in preschool and 
> refutes the quality-assurance, production-model assumptions that 
> underlie its use with young children. Citing the best available 
> research, he summarizes the arguments against such testing in early 
> childhood:
>
> ·       the practical problems of measuring the developmentally 
> unreliable;
> ·       unintended but real consequences for teaching and learning;
> ·       the failure of such tests to account for tremendous 
> differences across the preschool population in prior opportunities to 
> learn;and
> ·       the demonstrably weak association between academic/cognitive 
> measures in preschool and like measures in first and second grade.
>
> Meisels goes on to examine how each of these facts or circumstances 
> contributed to the failure of Head Start 's National Reporting System, 
> one of the largest-scale examples of early childhood accountability 
> testing to date. Finally, Meisels takes up the question of how to 
> measure program effectiveness and program quality. He argues for 
> program evaluation: collecting data on
>
> ·       structural and dynamic characteristics of programs 
> (child-staff ratios, staff training, developmentally appropriate 
> practice, positive interaction between children and staff, parental 
> involvement,etc.),
> ·       key demographic variables, and finally,
> ·       programs' impact on children.
>
> To measure the latter, Meisels proposes creating an assessment based 
> on item response theory (IRT), using a metric that describes 
> children's relative position on a developmental path. Such an 
> assessment will not only indicate whether children are learning. It 
> will enable the analysis of program elements, pedagogical techniques, 
> and child outcomes to determine whether particular aspects of a 
> program or child and family background are more or less strongly 
> associated with child outcomes. By learning what works for whom, we 
> can move beyond simply identifying a particular program 's outcomes to 
> determining what we can do to help that program --and the young 
> children it serves --succeed.
>
>
> Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. 
> Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a 
> sort of amusement.
>
>         - Plato

--



P.J. Hallam, Ph.D., UC Berkeley  
Evaluating the Validity of Teacher Licensure Decisions 
Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center 
2000 Center Street #301
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 666-9282 (office) -9286 (fax)