Assessing development and readiness for school across different cultural and language groups

Abstract

This paper provides information on a measure that was developed to assess children's level of development at preschool and entry to school level, as well as their readiness for formal schooling. This measure – Who Am I? – is based on early copying and writing skills and is designed to identify the broad stages of development that underlie children's readiness for more formal learning in a school situation. Although originally developed in Australia, it has now been used in studies in a number of different countries, including Canada, and data from these studies provide some insight into the variations in development that are associated with different patterns of preschool provision and different ages of entry into an educational program. The results of these studies indicate that Who Am I? provides a valid measure of development across different language and cultural groups and can therefore be used as a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of different forms of early childhood provision, as well as children's readiness for more formal learning in a school situation.

Acknowledgements

The contribution of colleagues who made their data available for the cross-cultural comparisons is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1.The work reported in this paper was undertaken during the time that the author was a Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research. This article is based on a paper presented at the 2002 National Dialogue Conference hosted by the Applied Research Branch of Human Resources Development, Canada, and subsequently published in their Research Paper Series.

2.Quest is a test analysis program that can be used to analyse test data using both Rasch scaling and traditional procedures. It scores and analyses multiple choice tests as well as Likert-type rating scales and partial credit items, providing a range of different types of item statistics and reliability estimates (see Adams & Khoo, 1996).

3.Further technical details relating to the validity and reliability of Who Am I? are reported in de Lemos and Doig (1999a, 1999b).

4.Effect sizes provide a measure of the difference in mean score between two groups expressed in terms of standard deviation units. They are, therefore, comparable across different studies, regardless of the actual unit of measurement, and are commonly used to compare results across different studies, as, for example, in meta-analyses. Effect sizes are calculated by subtracting the mean raw score of the first group (the control or reference group) from the mean raw score of the second group (the experimental or comparison group) and dividing this difference by the standard deviation of the control (or reference) group, or by the total sample (Cohen, 1969). Positive effect sizes, therefore, indicate higher scores for the experimental or comparison group, while negative effect sizes indicate higher scores for the control or reference group. In the case of the comparisons based on relative age, positive effect sizes indicate that the scores of the older age group are higher than the scores of the younger age group, while negative effect sizes indicate that the scores of the younger age group are higher than the scores of the older age group. Following Cohen (1969), an effect size of .20 is interpreted as a small effect, an effect size of .50 is interpreted as a moderate effect and an effect size of .80 is interpreted as a large effect.

5.Since this sample was drawn from an English-speaking area, the sample did not include any children whose first language was French. For this reason, the comparison according to language background is based on English-speaking versus non-English-speaking groups.