A Navigation System for Early Childhood Assessment and Instructional Planning

During Phase I in 2019, the team developed a prototype dashboard that early-childhood educators used to review assessment data collected from the observation-based and game-based tools and track progress of individual children towards school readiness. At the end of Phase I, in a pilot study with 5 early childhood educators and 100 children, the researchers demonstrated that all of the educators successfully integrated the prototype with no disruption to their daily practices, that the assessments matched educators own qualitative understanding of children's abilities, and that the prototype eased monitoring of child progress and helped identify areas where children need instructional support.

In Phase II, the team will iteratively refine and then fully develop the dashboard, the early childhood formative assessments, and the navigation system so that the assessment data is actionable for early-childhood educators. During this process, validity and reliability of the assessments will be examined. After development is complete, the team will carry out a small-scale randomized controlled study with 16 pre-Kindergarten classrooms and 400 students (25 per class) to examine the usability and feasibility, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the dashboard to inform teacher insights and guide instruction, and improve children's school readiness. Half of the classes will be randomly assigned to use the intervention and the dashboard for 12 weeks and the other half assigned to a business-as-usual group. The researchers will use standardized measures including the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening and the Individual Growth and Development Indicators of Early Numeracy to measure student achievement. Given the cluster randomized design and inherent nested structure, a hierarchical linear model will be employed to estimate the impact of the dashboard and navigation system on student numeracy and literacy outcomes. Costs will be calculated based on the actual per student and class wide implementation costs.