A User-Informed Process to Design Assessments for All Learners

The Centering User Perspectives in Assessment Design resource aims to support assessment developers as they embark on product conception, research, and development to foster innovation in early learning assessment tools that are used in pre-K settings and make progress toward the goals outlined in the User-Informed Principles. It offers guiding prompts in the areas of content development, implementation, and data use to address this question:

• How can user perspectives be integrated into the design of early learning assessments to make tools more accurate, usable, and useful?

Blueprints for Assessment Content Development

The Pre-K Content Blueprint Series serves as a resource for content and item development in the domains of language, literacy, mathematics, and executive function. Each Pre-K Content Blueprint has three goals:

• Describe skills in each domain and how they develop in children from ages 3 to 5.
• Place assessment users’ perspectives and needs at the center of the design of innovative assessments in each domain.
• Provide an overview of existing assessments in each domain and highlight some ways that they advance toward the goals outlined in the User-Informed Principles.

The Pre-K Content Blueprint Series–Technical Manual describes the process for using federal and state early learning standards to summarize children’s skills and the developmental trajectories featured in the Pre-K Content Blueprint Series.

The K-2 Content Blueprint Series was developed to support the design of assessments that measure the progression of children’s developmental skills from pre-K through second grade. The K-2 blueprints include the domains of English language arts and mathematics. These should be used in conjunction with the Pre-K Language, Literacy, and Mathematics Content Blueprints to enable the upward extension of assessment content and item banks to create continuity in data systems during the early years of formal schooling. Each K-2 Content Blueprint has four goals:

• Describe skills in each domain and how they develop in children from kindergarten to second grade.
• Provide an example of how to map learning standards in pre-K to the standards in kindergarten to second grade to understand developmental progressions in each domain.
• Place assessment users’ perspectives and needs at the center of the design of innovative assessments in each domain.
• Provide an overview of existing assessments in each domain.