A screening tool to assess school readiness in at-risk kindergarten children
Past research has often underscored a link between school readiness in early childhood and later academic success. Upon kindergarten entry, most children already exhibit the required social and cognitive skills that predict later academic success. However, some experience difficulties that are often linked to underlying personal, family, or social risk factors. This places them at risk for later academic underachievement and failure. This article introduces a school readiness assessment tool to facilitate screening in children from at-risk populations. The psychometric characteristics of the screening tool were measured using a sample of 4336 kindergarten children. At kindergarten entry, teachers were asked to rate children's health and well-being, cognitive development, socialization, and self regulation. Sixteen subcomponents of school readiness were established in order to generate a profile of children's strengths and weaknesses in daily class activities and routines. Norms are proposed in order to compare individual results according to age (in months), sex, and language spoken at home. Its concurrent and predictive validity characteristics are comparable to other tools used by professionals working within the school system. This method offers a cheaper, wide-scale alternative to expensive individual testing by offering a preliminary screening to identify cases that warrant further more in-depth professional testing. We examined differences in individual results in relation to later academic success and offer different uses of the evaluative screening tool in at-risk populations.