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ABSTRACT
Research Findings
Kindergarten Entry Assessments (KEAs) – assessment tools used at the beginning of kindergarten to provide educators with a snapshot of children’s readiness for school – are increasingly being adopted by states across the country. The purpose of this study is to examine the implementation of North Carolina’s KEA through analysis of data from an exploratory qualitative study during the initial years of implementation (2015-2018). We conducted interviews with state- and county-level administrators as well as kindergarten teachers. Our findings focus on the intervention itself, the process of data use, the organization and political context surrounding implementation, and potential outcomes of the KEA. Policy and Practice: Implications for policy and practice are identified, including the need to design KEAs to cover a holistic range of domains, for professional development to focus on use of data in addition to collection of data, and for KEA implementation to embed principles of continuous improvement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Information about the NC KEA is available here: http://www.ncpublicschools.org/earlylearning/kea/.
2. Our use of the term “construct progressions” throughout the paper refers to North Carolina’s use of the term in its implementation of the NC KEA. The NC KEA only uses a small set of measures that can not fully capture the depth and breadth of an entire construct or developmental domain. As such, while we use terms like “assessing the X domain,” recognize that we understand the measure can not actually capture the full construct.
3. Others have offered typologies of data use within schools (e.g., Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, Citation2007; Lyons & Algozzine, Citation2006). Firestone and González (Citation2007), for example, posit three types: using data to guide instructional actions, using data to enlighten teachers and school leaders, and using data to mobilize support for decisions.