Measuring the reading skills and knowledge of young children was not easy. An assessment was needed that was appropriate for children ages 4–7 and that reflected what was being taught in kindergarten and 1st grade in 1998–2000 (when the ECLS–K assessments were being administered). To respond to these challenges, the developers of the study created an adaptive assessment that was administered individually to students and was untimed. As described below, the ECLS–K reading assessment covered a range of content areas and included items that measured children's various abilities, such as basic skills, vocabulary, and comprehension.

• Basic skills include recognizing the printed word and its component orthographic and phonological coding skills (e.g., knowledge of the alphabet and of the relationship of letters to sounds at the beginning and ending of words).
  
  
• Vocabulary includes knowing the meaning of single words that represent objects and groups of objects, actions, and qualities of space and time.
  
  
• Four types of reading comprehension skills include initial understanding (e.g., identifying the main point of a passage, understanding words in the context of simple passages); interpretation (e.g., linking information across parts of the text as well as focusing on specific information); personal reflection and response (e.g., connecting knowledge from the text with children's own personal background knowledge); and demonstration of a critical stance (considering text objectively—e.g., what events in a passage of text are plausible). Because most kindergartners are just beginning to read, the ECLS–K uses items that assess children's listening comprehension and their reading comprehension.

Absent from the ECLS–K direct reading framework is children's writing. It is not feasible to include a sampling of children's writings given the practical constraints associated with the cost of scoring their samples. The ECLS–K assessment did not include a direct measure of children's oral language.² Nonetheless, by assessing a variety of reading skills appropriate for both kindergartners and 1st-graders, the study provides powerful information at a single point in time (i.e., estimates upon entry to kindergarten) and over time (i.e., estimates of growth across kindergarten and 1st grade) (for more information, see Rock and Pollack 2002).

²Teachers of the ECLS–K children were asked about children's writing and oral language skills, and oral language was included as a part of the study's direct assessment of language minority children. (back to text)