Purpose
Our purpose is to support the development and refinement of web-based
tools for continuous progress monitoring and collaborative decision making.
We see an ever-increasing demand for greater levels of accountability
from early childhood practitioners. Without such accountability, national
constituencies have difficulty gauging how well early childhood practitioners
are achieving programmatic objectives and how much more can be done to
optimize services and child outcomes. This is especially true for young
children with disabilities, who have been traditionally excluded from
typical measures of educational accountability.
We also recognize the strong conceptual linkages between preschool development
and later competency and functioning in home and school environments.
To date, however, researchers have yet to generate sufficient information
on the relationships between specific preschool outcomes and subsequent
performance. Thus, we will identify early childhood skills related to
later competencies, while at the same time maintain an individualized
focus. This effort has been based on a set of "common" developmental outcomes
we identified for children between birth and eight years of age.
For many of the outcomes identified, we will develop and study growth
indicators that allow practitioners and families to monitor individual
children's changes over time toward these outcomes, as well as facilitate
aggregation of data across children to gain insights on changes by groups
Finally, we began this project with the understanding that identification
of developmental outcomes is not synonymous with describing an inflexible
progression of skills. Developmental outcomes for any particular child
result from interactions between the child's specific characteristics
and the people and materials in the child's environments. We want to create
assessment systems to help evaluate these interactions, which in turn
should assist early childhood educators to create and revise interventions
to impact children's developmental progress.
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