Weaknesses and strengths in assessing early childhood programmes: an assessment of an early childhood Spanish trilingual programme in two‐ to three‐year‐old children

Abstract

This article gives an account of the results from an assessment of an early childhood education programme, conducted over the course of two academic years (1999-2000 and 2000-2001), in a centre in northeastern Spain. The purpose of the assessment was to discover how a particular educational programme contributed to the short-term competency levels of children aged from two to three years old. The programme's curriculum encompassed different areas of development, including physical exercise and motor movement and social and linguistic development, using a unique teaching methodology that exposes the children to three different languages at the same time. The article includes a discussion of the weaknesses and strengths in implementing evaluation in early childhood education programmes, and concludes with some guiding principles that may prove useful in the evaluation of the appropriateness of any given assessment method used within an early childhood educational programme.

Agreement and Reliability of Parental Reports and Direct Screening of Developmental Outcomes in Toddlers at Risk

“…Also, our standardized DS tool, the HLL has its own limitations. First, the last reported use and correction was normed a decade ago ( Rivas et al, 2010 ) and it is thus less up-to-date than other early DS tools ( Boggs et al, 2019 ). Second, like any other screening test, CARE only allows for a ‘snapshot’ of a child at one time point, limiting the ability to capture the full range of a child’s functioning.…”

“…The HLL ( Fuentes-Biggi et al, 1992 ; Iceta and Yoldi, 2002 ; Rivas et al, 2010 ) was used by the research team for individual assessment of children. The individual developmental performance score is defined as the number of age-appropriate test items of a domain in HLL that a child can successfully pass or not.…”

“…The HLL (Fuentes-Biggi et al, 1992;Iceta and Yoldi, 2002;Rivas et al, 2010) pass or not. For nominal classification, a "Caution" is recorded when an age-appropriate item is not passed.…”

“…HLL was selected because the DDST is broadly used and standardized in different countries ( Lipkin and Gwynn, 2007 ; Guevara et al, 2013 ; Dawson and Camp, 2014 ), including populated regions in Brazil ( Lopez-Boo et al, 2020 ) and Colombia ( Rubio-Codina and Grantham-McGregor, 2020 ). The HLL is a similar Spanish language version of the DDST, used previously in a long-term health screening program in the Basque Country ( Fuentes-Biggi et al, 1992 ; Rivas et al, 2010 ). The HLL items included in CARE and the whole designing process follow the components recommended by Nadeem et al (2016) for construction and validation of assessment tools.…”