Curriculum-Based Emergent Literacy Assessment in Early Childhood

ABSTRACT

Speech-language pathologists who work in early childhood settings are concerned with monitoring and evaluating progress and making appropriate instructional adjustments to promote at-risk children's language and literacy development. Curriculum-based assessment can be effective in providing practitioners with this type of information. This article discusses processes and procedures for implementing curriculum-based assessment and suggests methods that professionals can use to teach assessment tasks to children who struggle with the task demands.

KEYWORDS

Assessment - curriculum-based assessment - young children

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APPENDIX A

Task Demands and Levels of Support: The Basis for Developmental Checklists

Level I: Produces target responses only with high levels of support

• Produces appropriate responses only when provided with direct and immediate imitative support

• Does not respond to probes to generate or recognize examples and does not spontaneously produce target behaviors even in instructional contexts

• Gives a semantic response to a phonological awareness task (e.g., when asked to identify objects that start with /p/ to go in a pot, the child says, “The pot is for making soup”; when asked what rhymes with cat, the child responds “cat and dog rhyme.”)

• Says, “I don't know,” gives an irrelevant response, or is puzzled in instruction

Level II: Recognizes and retrieves target responses with modeling in instruction

• Imitates productions or responds appropriately to very salient targets during instruction

• Generates or recognizes target behavior with moderate levels of support (e.g., yes or no headshake, modeled response, gestures toward an object that reflects the target response)

• Recognizes or identifies exaggerated, familiar examples of a skill in a familiar activity

• Repeats target stimulus (e.g., when asked to generate a word that begins with the same letter as bed the child says, “bed”)

Level III: Retrieves or recognizes familiar targets

• Identifies or calls attention to familiar targets (those encountered in prior instruction) in noninstructional contexts

• Generates familiar targets in noninstructional contexts (e.g., after participating in a rhyme activity using -ug, the student sees a bug and says, “I know what rhymes with bug - hug”)

• Responds correctly, consistently, and confidently to familiar positive examples but not to negative examples (e.g., is confident when asked to identify word pairs such as “park-pot” but is less confident when asked to identify word pairs such as “park-ship”)

Level IV: Retrieves or generates novel targets in a new context

• Recognizes or generates several different novel targets (those not encountered in instruction) in novel contexts without support

• Identifies or calls attention to target words, sounds, or phrases that are encountered in texts, either oral or written depending on whether it is a phonological awareness or print-based skill

• Generates more than one example (e.g., “think of a word that rhymes with _________; now think of another word that rhymes with________.”)

• Generates nonsense examples (e.g., makes up words that start with a target sound [sable for table]; plays with nonsense rhyme words; spontaneously uses letter-sounds to produce invented spellings)

• Consistently and confidently responds correctly (at or near 100%) to requests to identify or generate target words, sounds, or phrases in new contexts