Child Assessment

Our developmentally appropriate child assessment methods help us work as your partner to meet your child's unique needs. Rather than administer task-based examinations, we rely on observations of each child's behavior and activities to uncover their motivations, interests, and emerging abilities. Our Teachers are trained to document children's development by observing, participating in play, taking notes, collecting art work, and photographing children engaged in learning activities.

With High/Scope's Key Developmental Indicators as our guide, we gather evidence of your child's explorations into individual developmental profiles. These profiles are available to you at any time, and feature photographs, drawings, and writing samples that serve as a record of your child's experiences with us. Conferences are scheduled twice a year, and are a valuable opportunity for sharing information, setting goals, and devising strategies to meet your child's needs.

Additionally, for children attending our programs from three to five days per week, we offer the following nationally recognized, validated child assessment tools: Teachers working with infants and toddlers use the Ounce Scale, a widely-used assessment system, to record observations of children in the following developmental categories: 

• Personal Connections
• How children show trust Feelings About Self 
  
• How children express who they are Relationships with Other Children 
  
• How children act around other children
  
• Understanding and Communicating 
  
• How children understand language and communicate Exploration and Problem Solving
•  How children explore and figure things out Movement and Coordination
  
• How children move their bodies and use their hands
  
  The Ounce Scale includes:
  
  1. Observation Records that teachers use to record children's activities
  2. Family Albums that serve as observational tools for use at home, and can include photographs, drawings, and written information
  3. Developmental Profiles and Standards that help us work with families during conferences to evaluate children's progress and identify goals.

Teachers working with preschool children use High/Scope's Child Observation Record (COR) to organize their written observations of children according to the following categories:

• Initiative: Making choices and plans, solving problems with materials, initiating play, and taking care of personal needs
• Social Relations: Relating to adults, relating to other children, resolving interpersonal conflict, and understand and expressing feelings
  
• Creative Representation: Making and building models, drawing and painting pictures, and pretending Movement and Music:
  
• Moving in various ways, moving with objects, feeling and expressing steady beat, moving to music, and singing
• Language and Literacy: Listening to and understanding speech, using vocabulary, using complex patterns of speech, showing awareness of sounds in words, demonstrating knowledge about books, using letter names and sounds, reading, and writing.
  
• Mathematics and Science: Sorting objects; identifying patterns; comparing properties; counting; identifying position and direction; identifying sequence, change, and causality; identifying materials and properties; and identifying natural and living things
  

 The behaviors listed under each category are called COR items and represent important developmental goals. Each item has five levels that describe how children typically progress. For example, "making choices and plans" is the first item under Initiative. Below are the five levels for this item:

Making choices and plans

1. Child indicates a choice by pointing or some other action.
2. Child expresses a choice in one or two words.
3. Child expresses a choice with a short sentence.
4. Child makes a plan with one or two details.
5. Child makes a plan with three or more details.