Testing the Cognitive Growth of Little Kids

Cognitive growth during the preschool years is expansive and rapid, but most tests on the market, written for older children, aren't sensitive enough to measure learning over small intervals of time.

As part of a Head Start curriculum development project, Penn GSE researchers created just such a test. Called the Learning Express (LE), it was developed in field trials with over 3,400 Head Start children ranging in age from three to five and a half years of age. Trained examiners administered LE in individual sessions lasting no longer than 30 minutes.

LE is an adaptive, skill-based test with four content domains — alphabet knowledge, vocabulary, listening comprehension, and mathematics — that include diverse subskills, aligned with the Head Start national standards.

Test items are ordered in ascending level of difficulty, starting with one that most children answer correctly. If the child does well on the first item, the test proceeds up the scale. After a specific number of incorrect responses, the assessor stops the session, thus cutting down on testing time.

To determine children's progress over time, reassessments are conducted approximately every two months. Individual growth-curve modeling demonstrated that the scores provide a highly sensitive measure of children's growth, controlled for age, sex, prior schooling, and language and special-needs status. In addition, multilevel modeling found that nearly all the variation in scoring was associated with the child's performance, not the examiner's.

"Measuring Preschool Cognitive Growth While It's Still Happening: The Learning Express," by Paul McDermott, John Fantuzzo, Clare Waterman, Lauren Angelo, Heather Warley, Vivian Gadsden, and Xiuyan Zhang, appears in Journal of School Psychology, 47.