In addition to creating Individual Growth and Development Indicators, Institute staff are developing and refining Exploring Solutions Assessments (ESAs) to help educators and families gather more detailed information about an individual child's developmental skills. These tools will allow us to identify features of classroom and home settings early childhood educators and families can change to improve children's developmental outcomes.
Three assessment approaches have been selected initially:
Measurement of critical program practices in early childhood education;
For more detailed information about these tools, please go to the Dissemination page to download our Technical Report #5: Research and Development of Exploring Solutions Assessments for Children Between Birth and Age Eight.
We will weave information from Individual Growth and Development Indicators and Exploring Solutions Assessments together to form a complete system of decision-making for any child whose developmental trajectory does not appear to meet expectations.
In this model (pictured below), we will use general outcomes and IGDIs to monitor a child's developmental growth and decide if we need to intervene in any way to boost the child's trajectory. We will use ESAs to generate options for intervening on the child's behalf and deciding which options to implement as potential solutions. Finally, we will continue to use outcomes and IGDIs to evaluate attempted solutions and monitor the child's ongoing developmental progress.
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This page was updated on
12/26/2008
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