Fidelity of Implementation in Assessment of Infants and Toddlers by Angela Stone-MacDonald Lianna Pizzo & Noah Feldman

Author:Angela Stone-MacDonald, Lianna Pizzo & Noah Feldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Post-assessment Checklist

The post-assessment checklist (Fig. 5.4) is shorter than the other two, but contains the critical steps that examiners need to follow to make sure that practitioners and caregivers understand and have the relevant test data. They need to know what the test data says about the child’s current outcomes and the relationship between the test data with other information gathered as well as the goals set to improve the child’s outcomes.

Fig. 5.4 Post-assessment checklist

The first suggestion in the checklist actually comes from our experiences as trainers and technical assistance providers, rather than our study. We noticed during our work with preservice and inservice early childhood professionals, that they did not always complete all of the steps required to fill out the front page of the test scoring sheet. This was true for practitioners conducting several different tests, but it made it harder to explain the different numbers and equivalencies (e.g., age equivalent) to families, if the practitioners had not completed the form and/or were not proficient with using the tables in the examiner’s manual to calculate the standardized scores and create the graph.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, training and practice are critical for the successful administration of standardized tests due to the complexity of materials, child development, child behaviors, and standardization procedures (Ellingsen, 2016; McConnell & Rahn, 2016). If early childhood professionals are using a test for the first time or have started using it recently, we encourage them to practice scoring a test using the examiner’s manual before doing so in the field with a family to gain more familiarity with the process and the procedures.

In our study, examiners were very good at reviewing the purpose of the assessment and the results of the comprehensive assessment with families, highlighting the strengths and areas of concern about the child’s development and discussing the families’ priorities moving forward when looking at child outcomes. Nevertheless, we included these items in the checklist because they are critically important to the assessment process and because our sample size was relatively small, we want to make sure that all early childhood professionals are aware of the importance of these steps. In addition, we want to make sure that families have plenty of time to answer questions.

In Banerjee and Luckner’s study on early childhood professionals’ views on what they needed and struggled with when doing assessment, the most common challenge was time (2013). Professionals wanted more time to do the tests and to learn about tests and ways to modify them for children with disabilities or children from diverse backgrounds whose first language was not English. In our experience, the assessment team has a limited window to assess and review the results with the family and sometimes may also incorporate the IFSP meeting into the time slot as well to plan for the child’s outcomes if they are determined to be eligible for services. This is a lot to do in a short time and can be tiring and overwhelming for all involved. For

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