Investigators at the Universities
of Minnesota, Kansas, and Oregon launched the Early Childhood Research Institute on
Measuring Growth and Development (ECRI-MGD) in October, 1996, to produce a
comprehensive system for measuring the skills and needs of individual children with
disabilities from birth to eight years of age.One important reason for this project lies in the ever-increasing demands for greater levels of accountability from early childhood practitioners. Without such accountability, national constituencies have difficulty gauging how well early childhood practitioners are achieving programmatic objectives and how much more can be done to optimize services and child outcomes. This is especially true for young children with disabilities, who have been traditionally excluded from typical measures of educational accountability.
We also recognize the strong conceptual linkages between preschool development and later competency and functioning in home and school environments. To date, however, researchers have yet to generate sufficient information on the relationships between specific preschool outcomes and subsequent performance. Thus, we will identify early childhood skills related to later competencies, while at the same time maintain an individualized focus. This effort has been based on a set of "common" developmental outcomes we identified for children between birth and eight years of age.
For many of the outcomes identified, we will develop and study growth indicators that allow practitioners and families to monitor individual children's changes over time toward these outcomes, as well as facilitate aggregation of data across children to gain insights on changes by groups.
Finally, we began this project with the understanding that identification of developmental outcomes is not synonymous with describing an inflexible progression of skills. Developmental outcomes for any particular child result from interactions between the child's specific characteristics and the people and materials in the child's environments. We want to create assessment systems to help evaluate these interactions, which in turn should assist early childhood educators to create and revise interventions to impact children's developmental progress.
The Institute's work is divided into five major task areas:
Selection of general growth outcomes for children between birth and age eight
purpose | investigators | dissemination | staff contacts | site map | home
This page was updated on
04/25/2008
©1996-2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.