School Readiness - Measuring and Monitoring Our Progress in School's Readiness

3.1.12 Measuring and Monitoring Our Progress in School's Readiness

Making schools ready to help and promoting the child's readiness to learn has become a priority within Canada at the national, provincial/territorial and local levels. This collection of documents has presented the rationale for preparing the school to receive children who are entering school. Based on an overview of the research readily available, this collection has presented and discussed the elements of a comprehensive approach that has schools reaching out to parents, other agencies and the community. Many specific suggestions on policy, programs, services and coordination have been made. Particular attention has been paid to what school principals can do immediately to ease the transition of students coming into their schools. But before closing, we need to discuss how progress towards the school's readiness can be measured and monitored.

The Canadian Association of School Administrators (1996) has summarized the research on the validity of indicators systems. They conclude that in order to be valid indicators must:

* · be directly related to the stated goals of the system(s) being monitored

* · include reliable and regularly collected data on context, inputs, processes, immediate outputs and long-term outcomes

* · not be used to measure the performance of specific programs or individuals

Phillips & Love (1994) prepared a discussion paper for the Department of Health and Human Services in the U.S. on the development of Indicators for School Readiness, Schooling and Child Care in Early to Middle Childhood. They raise important issues that must also be considered by Canadians as we develop the needed measuring and monitoring system.

The first issue raised by Phillips and Love is the ambiguity in the concepts of school readiness or readiness to learn. We have just begun to develop a holistic view of the developmental readiness of the child at this age. We will need to find measurements of these multiple dimensions that are reliable and realistic to collect. Also, we will need to develop a consensus on what aspects of the school's readiness to receive the child that are most important.

Phillips and Love note the tension between the two sides of this equation. We cannot end up blaming children or parents by having data only on their readiness to learn. Neither can we assume that schools will be able to correct for all of the problems accumulated before school entry.

The second major issue in developing indicators on readiness relate to what is measurable and what can be measured at a reasonable cost. Phillips and Love describe the efforts made by several agencies in the U.S. on this issue.

The National Education Goals Panel in the US commissioned a Technical Planning Group that identified several dimensions of the child's readiness to learn. These include physical well-being and motor development, social and emotional development, approaches towards learning, language use and cognition/general knowledge.

Phillips and Love have drawn from several sources to suggest that other home-related indicators of readiness to learn should include exposure to reading at home, exposure to pre-numeracy experiences, approaches to learning by the child, emergent literacy and numeracy development, the proportion of students deemed unready for kindergarten, parental attitudes and expectations and access to instruction in the child's native language.

They also suggest indicators associated with child care, including the quality and characteristics of the day-care, the stability of care, the proportion of children eligible for early intervention programs, the proportion of children under 13 in latchkey situations, the costs of day-care relative to family income and parental choices about day-care services.

Early school indicators related to readiness are also suggested by Phillips and Love. They include achievement, grade retention and remedial programs, student engagement in school, parental involvement and ESL instruction.

The preceding brief review of the American experience in developing Indicators on readiness confirm Katz's (1993) assertion that there are multiple perspectives on the quality, and hence the measurement, of the school readiness programs.

Eventually, choices will have to be made in limiting the number of Indicators that can be tracked to monitor readiness to learn and the school's readiness.

However, we cannot allow ourselves to be seduced by simplicity or to limit our Indicators to only outcomes data. We will need a balance to reflect the realities of context, the processes (programs, services, resources, practices) that are in place, the immediate outputs and the long-term outcomes.

Other Uses of Evaluation

Katz (1993) has shown us how evaluation and monitoring systems are, in fact, value-laden choices about what we consider to be important in education. She describes multiple perspectives on the quality of early childhood education that include probing questions from the top-down (administrative), bottom-up (child), outside-inside (parents) and inside (teachers) perspectives.

A review of several case studies (Seven Communities, 1996), offers a variety of evaluation strategies and uses of assessment. The cases include large scale and small scale examples.

Katz & Chard (1996) look at the documentation of early childhood learning experiences both as an evaluative and pedagogical tool. Documentation, in the form of careful observation of children and record-keeping, has often been used in early childhood programs. However, based on the experience of Italian preschools, they suggest that extensive use of displaying of student works can improve programs, communicate with parents and inform decision makers. This would appear to be similar to the "portfolio" approach in student assessment.

For more on school readiness go to these pages:

3.1.1 Kindergarten

3.1.2 Instruction

3.1.3 Curriculum / Learning Outcomes

3.1.4 Student Assessment

3.1.5 School Social Climate

3.1.6 School Physical Environment

3.1.7 Involving Parents

3.1.8 Early Prevention

3.1.9 Poverty

3.1.10 Special Needs

3.1.11 Support from School District, Ministry and Other Agencies

For more on home, agency and community readiness, go back to the Introduction.