Company
BOSTON, MA (August 2002) - The federal government's early childhood initiatives, which seek to improve the literacy and language skills of children from preschool through third grade, are raising standards and demanding accountability for results in school readiness. Given the inherent demands of accountability, administrators and teachers are now looking for easy solutions to meet reporting requirements. Broward County recently found a solution, which encouraged a switch from using an offline early childhood assessment tool to an online assessment system.

Broward is one of the largest school districts in the nation and is the second most populated district in Florida after Dade County. It offers two Pre-K programs: Head Start and Florida's state-funded School Readiness Program, formerly known as the Pre-K Early Intervention Program. There are approximately 6,000 preschool children in Broward County schools. More than half of this population comprises 3,260 four-year old children with an additional 650 on a wait list to enter the School Readiness Program.

For the last 10 years, Broward County has been assessing children using an offline tool. Manually recording and aggregating data at the classroom level has always been a cumbersome process for our teachers. Likewise, our administrators have faced an equally overwhelming task of having to manually aggregate large amounts of data for reporting purposes at the program level. This article is a case study in the design and functionality issues that were considered while choosing a valid, online assessment tool for Broward County's pre-K programs.

Child Development Process
The development process of young children between the ages of 2 and 5 is vastly different from the development of children in K-12. Intense brain growth during this period influences stages of development in four major areas: physical and motor development, cognition and general knowledge, social and emotional development, and language usage and literacy. During this development period, children progress at different rates. Therefore, early childhood assessments must be individualized and made on a continuous basis. Young children are not compared to one another, but rather, their learning and progress are compared to meaningful standards.

Valid Assessments
With standards moving down into the early years, it is critical for programs to implement a valid and research-based assessment system to ensure their accountability. Head Start Programs must also ensure that this system links to the required Outcomes and Frameworks.

Since Head Start Outcomes report requirements consume a substantial amount of our administrators' and teachers' time, Broward County's Child Development Department wanted to equip their staff to meet these demands. The Department looked for ways that would help teachers and administrators to effectively gather and aggregate data in the most economical manner. Florida's Department of Education and Region IV Head Start, in collaboration with the Florida Head Start State Office, set up meetings for vendors and program administrators to discuss early childhood assessment and to evaluate the different online assessment options available for early childhood programs.

In January of 2002, we invited a representative from Teaching Strategies, Inc., creators of The Creative Curriculum to Broward County to offer a training session on their product CreativeCurriculum.net. CreativeCurriculum.net is the online assessment system based on The Creative Curriculum Developmental Continuum, a valid and reliable assessment instrument for children ages 3 through 5. CreativeCurriculum.net allows preschool programs to seamlessly link curriculum, assessment, child learning opportunities, parent involvement, and outcomes reporting in a single, secure interactive tool. The technology behind this system was developed by SchoolSuccess, a Pearson Education Company. The solution was very attractive to our teachers as we were looking for an online system.

Monitoring a child's performance in early childhood education allows a teacher to use the information she acquires about a child's skills and knowledge to individualize instruction and to plan accordingly. When a teacher completes a progress checkpoint on CreativeCurriculum.net, for instance, the system instantly responds with recommended strategies specific to that child. These recommended strategies are available to the teacher for use in the classroom; recommendations for the parents to use at home are also given. This feature is essential in programs where the professional growth and development of teachers and administrators is a high priority

One of the most appealing features of CreativeCurriculum.net to our teachers is its ability to generate individual student and class reports. In particular, CreativeCurriculum.net reports patterns of child progress directly against the Head Start Framework. The technology developed by SchoolSuccess would also allow data to map against other educational frameworks. This product also enables our administrators to produce reports at the site and program levels, which eases their administrative workload. Because data is accessible from anywhere, producing reports becomes a very easy task. Our teachers will simply complete their assessments online. From there, the various reports, on a child, a whole class, a site, a program, or school district, will automatically be generated with the click of a mouse.

Broward County recently purchased more than 2,000 portfolios for the 2002-2003 academic year. Head Start classes will begin using the online version in August. The majority of our classrooms have Internet connectivity, and we plan to have all classrooms wired as soon as possible. As additional computers are connected, more teachers will go online with CreativeCurriculum.net. Because on-going computer training and professional development are built-in components of Broward County's management system, our teachers are experienced computer and Internet users.

Conclusion
Our department wanted to help our teachers meet their increasing reporting requirements so we chose to go online with CreativeCurriculum.net with technology developed by SchoolSuccess because it will make assessment, planning, and teaching easier for our staff. Ultimately, our goal is to have our teachers spending more time in the classroom with our children. CreativeCurriculum.net reduces our administrative load to make that possible.

Marlyn Black has worked in the Broward County School District for 27 years in different capacities including Kindergarten, first, second, and fourth grade teacher, Middle School Special Education, Reading Curriculum Specialist for K-12, Reading and Language Arts Specialist for K-5, Reading Specialist for K-12, and Teacher Specialist in the Child Development Department. As a Teacher Specialist, Marlyn identifies assessment tools and offers technical support to teachers in the Head Start, Pre-K, and pre-school exceptional student education (ESE) programs.