Research

The Getting on Track Early for School Success (GoT) project has created objective, valid, and instructionally relevant assessments of oral language and literacy skills and numerical and spatial reasoning skills for 3-5 year old children. These assessments are designed to be quickly and easily administered by early childhood educators in the classroom while serving as highly statistically reliable measures for longitudinal learning achievement. In addition to developing this series of assessments, GoT provides educators with clear and continuous feedback to recognize skill-level milestones and support each student throughout the school year. GoT additionally provides classroom instructional materials to help teachers scaffold student learning in tandem with the assessment.

I have been actively involved in the development of the Oral Language and Literacy (OLL) assessment and instructional materials since 2017. Serving as an IES Pre-Doctoral Fellow on the project, I developed crosswalks from the GoT assessment to commonly used pre-K curricula. While it became clear from these crosswalks and teacher feedback that pre-K educators felt comfortable supporting students in early literacy skills, this was not the case for oral language skills. A unique feature of the Getting on Track assessments is the evidence-based emphasis on promoting oral language development in addition to literacy, such morphological production, syntactic comprehension, and concept formation. My primary role on this project has been to strategically fill in those gaps: 1) revising assessment items and administration design, 2) drafting plain-English explanations for teachers for how and why we assess these unfamiliar skills as well as benchmarks and stage-based learning objectives, 3) creating lesson plans for instructional activities to offer educators concrete methods for incorporating oral language learning into their classrooms.

Principal investigators and project leadership: Alana Dulaney, PhD; Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD; Marc Hernandez, PhD; Debbie Leslie, MAT; Susan C Levine, PhD; Stephen Raudenbush, EdD; Janet Sorkin, PhD

The Survey of Parent/Provider Expectations and Knowledge (SPEAK) is an assessment of caregivers’ knowledge in the areas of early childhood cognitive and language development. The SPEAK was developed by the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, led by Dr. Dana Suskind. The self-administered survey is designed for both clinical and research settings and is available in both English and Spanish.

The SPEAK is continuously revised to reflect the most current findings in developmental psychology, education, and pediatric research. I contributed to the third revision currently in use (as of Sep. 2020), the SPEAK-IV. My work with TMW was in two major components – theoretical foundations and item development. I created an evidence-based outline of the “ideal” survey, cross-cutting four developmental periods in early childhood and eight content domains, e.g. language production, math, and screen-media use. Using this as a guideline, I revised existing items to more accurately address target measures, to be accessible to adults from diverse social, educational, linguistic, and economic backgrounds, and to reflect evolving scientific findings and socio-cultural attitudes. I developed new items across domains, with particular attention to dual-language learning, screen-media usage, and mathematical development.

Principal investigators and project leadership: Marc Hernandez, PhD; Alison Hundertmark; Christy Leung, PhD; Dana Suskind, MD