Facts In Action

According to the U.S. Department of Education Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, almost one in ten children entering kindergarten in the fall of 1998 came from homes in which English was not the primary language spoken. While there is increasing interest in measuring child developmental outcomes for children in early care and education programs, the evaluation and assessment of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers who are culturally or linguistically diverse presents significant challenges to early childhood professionals. The Institute for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) has developed a digest to summarize the literature on linguistic diversity and assembled recommendations to assist early childhood professionals in selecting nonbiased instruments and strategies for assessment.

One of the main challenges to early childhood professionals is identifying appropriate and nonbiased assessment instruments. Many professionally prepared assessments rely on child development milestones taken from other tests or research involving primarily children from Euro-American, middle-class backgrounds. In addition, in creating the scoring or rating scales for these assessments, most have not included children who are culturally and linguistically diverse in the testing population. And while some assessment instruments are available in multiple languages, if the original instrument from which they were translated was developed based on the behavioral "norms" of only one culture, the instrument is still not multi-culturally "friendly," regardless of translation.

To help early childhood professionals select nonbiased instruments and assessment strategies, CLAS has suggested the following guidelines in determining whether an assessment is culturally and linguistically biased:

• If the assessment has a scoring or rating scale, which cultural groups have been included in developing these scales? Are separate scales available for the cultural group?

• If the assessment says it is appropriate for specific cultural groups, has information about child-rearing practices and child development for children from those groups been incorporated into the assessment?

• Are suggestions for modifying the assessment for children from different cultural groups included?

• Does the instrument include recommendations for interpreting the behavior of children who are culturally or linguistically diverse?

If the answers to these questions are "no," programs should consider seeking alternative tools that better reflect the needs of the children they serve.

In the next issue of Making it Count we will discuss the summary of two workshops on outcome measurement convened by the Board on Children, Youth and Families of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine.

Source:
Conducting Child Assessments, M. McLean, Early Childhood Research Institute on Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services, Technical Report #2, September 2000.

For more information:
contact CLAS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 61 Children's Research Center, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, IL 61820-7498, call (800) 583-4135 or go on-line at clas.uiuc.edu/techreport/tech2.html.

A Special Issue of Facts in Action — Over the past year, Facts in Action published a series of articles designed to take you step-by-step through the process of measuring outcomes in your program or family child care home. This series of articles has been repackaged into a special issue of the Facts in Action newsletter and is now available for only $2.00 per copy.

If you would like to order this special issue of Facts in Action, please contact:

Erika Argersinger
Early Education Clearinghouse
Associated Early Care and Education, Inc.
95 Berkeley Street, Suite 306
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 695-0700 x271
eargersinger@associatedearlycareandeducation.org

Facts in Action, December 2001