IM-07 Attachment A - Description of the NRS Child Assessment Items

Attachment A - Description of the NRS Child Assessment Items

In the design of the NRS field test, the Head Start Bureau convened a Technical Work Group of experts to review the selection of tasks to be included in the child assessment and available early childhood assessment instruments and findings, including tools utilized in Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2000 and National Head Start Impact Study (NHSIS).

The selection of tasks to be included in the individual child assessment was guided by the following criteria. Tasks in the assessment are intended to appraise skills that:

Congress and the President expect children to learn in Head Start, as indicated by their being among the mandated achievement goals contained in legislation that reauthorizes the Head Start program in 1998;
Are critical stepping-stones on the path to achievement in elementary school, especially in the areas of reading and mathematics;
Can be readily enhanced by activities in Head Start;
Head Start parents want their children to learn;
A majority of U.S. children from non-low-income families have mastered by the time they begin kindergarten; and
Can be reliably measured in a relatively brief child assessment that is conducted by a Head Start teacher or other local staff member.

Based on the Technical Work Group's review, the Head Start Bureau approved a field test version of five components. Most of the child-items in the NRS have been used extensively in FACES, the National Head Start Impact Study, or the Head Start Quality Research Center studies, involving more than 7000 Head Start children, as well as in other major studies of low-income preschoolers. The results of these assessments in FACES research over the past seven years have proven to be highly stable from cohort to cohort, not only in terms of the levels of progress with which children enter or leave the Head Start program, but also in terms of their growth over time. Findings from these studies also demonstrate that the assessment works well with children from diverse backgrounds. The items utilized in the NRS field test includes the following components:

Comprehension of Spoken English to address the Head Start goal areas of "Develops ability to understand and use language," "Uses increasingly complex and varied vocabulary," and "Progresses in understanding and speaking English (for non-English speakers)." This task is composed of the Oral Language Development Scale (OLDS) of the PreLAS 2000, asking the child to follow simple one-step commands in spoken English, as in the game "Simon Says." The second part asks the child to name or explain the function of objects in a series of ten pictures.

For children who are English-language learners, these tasks assess the child's ability to follow simple spoken instructions and give the English names of familiar objects. This serves as a screener for identifying children who should be assessed in Spanish rather than in English. For other children, this serves as a "warm-up" establishing rapport with the child and helping children feel comfortable with the one-on-one situation. The estimated time for this task is 3 minutes.

Vocabulary addresses the Head Start goal area of "understands increasingly complex and varied vocabulary." The vocabulary task has been adapted from the Third Edition of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-III), which has been used successfully in two cohorts of FACES and which has shown that children in Head Start make meaningful gains toward national norms over the course of the program year and during kindergarten. For the sake of simplicity of administration, each child receives 24 items representing an appropriate range of items for the Head Start child. This task assesses understanding of words representing parts of the human body or their functions, activities of daily living, emotions and feelings, work/career-related activities, and plants, animals and their habitats. The estimated time for this is 5 minutes.
Letter Naming addresses the Head Start goal area of "Identifies at least 10 letters of the alphabet, especially those in own name." The Letter Naming task is a test developed for use in the Head Start Quality Research Centers (QRC) curricular intervention studies. Children are shown all 26 letters of the alphabet, divided into three groups of 8, 9, and 9 letters, and arranged in approximate order of item difficulty. They are asked to identify the letters they know by name. The QRC data show that this task has excellent validity and reliability. The estimated time for this task is 3 minutes.
Early Math addresses the Head Start goal area of "Numbers and operations." The Early Math skills task is a new task adapted from the Math assessment used in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of a kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K). It is composed of items similar to but not identical with items that proved to be in the easier difficulty range in the ECLS-K data, ones that most children in that study had mastered by the beginning of kindergarten.
Items address a range of relevant mathematical skills including number recognition of one-digit numerals, basic geometric shapes, matching number names with objects, counting, simple addition and subtraction, making judgements about the relative size of objects, and interpreting simple measurements and graphic representations. The estimated time for this is 3 minutes.

(A fifth component related to the goal of improving phonological awareness was included in the NRS field test. However, based on the results of the field test and the recommendation of the NRS Technical Work Group, we have decided not to include it in the NRS this year.)

Children whose home language is Spanish and who are English-language learners will be given a Spanish version of the NRS items. The Spanish version will include Tio Simon and La Casita from the PreLAS, the Spanish version of the vocabulary task, which has been adapted from the Test de Vocabulario en Imagenes Peabody, and a Spanish translation of the Early Math tasks. The assessment will also include a Spanish version of the Letter Naming Task, containing the complete Spanish language alphabet. Spoken English will be assessed with the Pre-LAS "Simon Says" and "Art Show" tasks.