Note: This WestEd project was completed in 2018.
WestEd’s Standards, Assessment, and Accountability Services program, in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Technology in Education, is enhancing the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA) that was previously developed by the same team and implemented in Maryland and Ohio.
The enhanced KRA includes improved items and expanded use of technology for more efficient administration, scoring, and reporting. The result is a more reliable and valid assessment that provides timely and actionable data to identify individual student and program strengths and weaknesses, drive instruction, support curriculum reform, and inform all stakeholders in the system about the effectiveness of preschool programs.
The enhanced KRA:
- Includes strategic use of a variety of item types to assess the essential domains of school readiness, with each domain making a significant contribution to each student’s overall comprehensive score
- Produces reliable, valid, and fair scores for individual children and groups/subgroups, which can be used to evaluate school readiness, guide instruction, and better understand the professional-development needs of early childhood educators and programs
- Incorporates technology in both the administration process and collection of data to ensure that the KRA is efficiently administered and maintained
- Provides data that can be incorporated into a state’s student assessment system and/or a state’s longitudinal data system