Office of Child Development and Early Learning (OCDEL) Research

1) To what extent are Pennsylvania’s Early Childhood Standards for Infants and Toddlers aligned with The Ounce Scale assessment (horizontal alignment)?
2) To what extent are Pennsylvania’s Early Childhood Standards for Pre-Kindergarten aligned with the Work Sampling System assessment (horizontal alignment)?
3) To what extent are Pennsylvania’s Early Childhood Standards for Infants and Toddlers aligned with the Early Childhood Standards for Pre-Kindergarten (vertical alignment)?
4) To what extent are Pennsylvania’s Early Childhood Standards for Pre-Kindergarten aligned with the Pennsylvania Kindergarten content standards (vertical alignment)?
5) To what extent are Pennsylvania’s Kindergarten content standards consistent with Pennsylvania’s third grade content standards (vertical alignment)?
6) To what extent is the Work Sampling System assessment being used in Pre-Kindergarten programs consistent with the Pennsylvania PSSA third grade assessment (vertical alignment)?

Since typical analyses conducted on early childhood standards simply look at the extent to which the items in one document “match” the items in another document, a new and innovative approach to analyzing alignment was developed for this Study. This approach to analyzing alignment addressed both match from one document to another and the quality of the alignment across documents. This analysis protocol was used to address alignment across the following four parameters: (1) Balance: the percentage of all indicators and items devoted to each domain, (2) Coverage: the degree to which template constructs are addressed by both documents, (3) Depth: the percentage of indicators/items found on each template construct within the domain, and (4) Difficulty: the level of cognitive or developmental demand in pairs of indicators and items across documents.

The study concluded that, overall, the standards and assessments were strong and showed good alignment across the age/grade levels. Three broad-based areas for improvement emerged: (1) Additional attention should be given to bolster the developmental elements in the revisions to the standards; (2) Pennsylvania’s standards contain more content than is assessed by the assessment instruments; and (3) Some indicators appear across age groups.

Based on the feedback from this study, the Pennsylvania Early Learning standards were revised.