Child Outcome Standards in Pre-K Programs - National Institute for ...

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Preschool Policy Brief March 2004Nine Keys to Effective Prekindergarten Standards (continued)5Standards should allow for a coherenteducational experience.When there are too many outcome standards, educationbecomes fragmented as teachers jump from one area tothe next, never spending enough time to offer the rangeof experiences young children need to really learn. Thosewho set outcome standards for preschoolers should striveto avoid this problem.Coherence also means that standards for one grade or levelshould align with the next. Standards should create acontinuum that flows from prekindergarten through highschool graduation or beyond. In K-12, content-specific skillsand knowledge can generally be presented sequentially. Aschildren progress through school, expectations build on theoutcome standards set for the previous grade.For preschoolers… Today, the need for the continuityfrom prekindergarten education through higher education(often referred to as P-16 education) appears to be widelyaccepted among educators. 7 At the same time, it is clear that“very few of the content area standards apply meaningfullyto very young children,” 9 and continuity should not occurat the expense of making preschool standards inappropriate.Placing preschool standards on a continuum of learningoutcomes is a challenging endeavor for a number ofreasons.Early childhood development does not always follow alinear path. It is not always straightforward to workbackwards from a higher grade. One cannot simply takean outcome expected by the end of third grade and stipulatethat one-fourth of this standard must be reached by theend of the prekindergarten year. In this respect, preschooloutcomes differ from most academic standards set for olderstudents.Continuity from preschool to elementary school standardsis especially challenging because existing outcome standardsfor the kindergarten year tend to be problematic.Kindergarten outcomes generally have been set using the“working backwards” approach. They are typically includedas a part of a larger grade band, such as K-2 or K-4, andthey are stated in terms of what should be accomplished bythe end of the highest grade. For example, by the end ofkindergarten, children may be expected to know the first30 of the 100 most common vocabulary words that shouldbe mastered by the end of second grade. This seemsreasonable, but few of the 30 words are likely to appearin the books children encounter in kindergarten (althoughthey become more common as children move throughelementary school). Basing preschool standards on afaulty kindergarten standard would be detrimental.Because kindergarten outcomes tend to be modeledon second- or fourth-grade standards, they often ignorethe developmental needs of 5-year-olds. For example,the domains of oral language development and socioemotionaldevelopment are often given inadequateattention. When kindergarten standards do not focussufficiently on foundational skills, aligning expectationswith kindergarten outcomes can have an adverse impacton preschool child outcomes.6
Preschool Policy Brief March 20046Standards should make sense to teachers and helpthem with their day-to-day work.Since the goal is to affect what children learn, standardsonly work if the skills and concepts children are expectedto master are the same skills and concepts they are taughtin the classroom and the same skills and concepts that aremeasured by assessments. Teachers must to be able toorient the educational experiences they offer to the skillsand content specified in the child outcome standards.For this to happen, the content of the standards mustbe developmentally appropriate, and standards should bespecific enough to allow teachers to know what is expectedof their students.Teachers should be able to align curriculum and classroomassessments with the standards. This alignment is crucial tothe effectiveness of standards. As analysts have observed, 7,19,20standards-based reform can be expected to produce a positiveimpact on student learning only when an instructionalsystem is “...driven by content standards, which aretranslated into assessments, curriculum materials,and professional development, which are all, inturn, tightly aligned to the content standards.” 20For preschoolers… As noted earlier, youngchildren learn in the context of interactionswith important adults and peers. Theirdevelopment and learning hinge on theirindividual developmental pathways andthe experiences they have in their homes,communities, and classrooms. For thisreason, there is great variation in howand when different children masterthe same knowledge and skills.Early childhood teachers therefore need more flexibilitythan K-12 teachers in how they implement child outcomestandards, and this flexibility must be built into the standards.Preschool child outcome standards must be usedwith reflection, not followed blindly. 21Standards documents should emphasize that teachersshould accommodate children’s learning strengths, needs,and interests wherever they are on the developmentalcontinuum, rather than trying to speed up or slow downtheir learning. A standards document can make this point,for example, by providing several levels of performance fora particular standard.Moreover, preschool standards should accommodate notonly specific concepts and skills, but also the foundationalskills (such as listening or paying attention) that developas children move throughearly childhood.7
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