The Early Childhood Assessment Rollercoaster: Understanding Cut-Off Scores
By Dr. Allison Kimble-Cusano
Culturally relevant, valid, and reliable early childhood assessments are a crucial part of high-quality early childhood systems. Unfortunately, navigating early childhood assessments can often feel like riding a rollercoaster. For many, assessment literacy is full of hidden turns, sudden drops, and never-ending spirals. Even the most seasoned early childhood practitioners sometimes find themselves upside-down and backwards, desperately trying to re-orient themselves, and wondering how to make heads or tails of the assessment data in front of them. Thankfully, just as rollercoasters use minimum height requirements to ensure riders’ safety, many early childhood assessments use cut-off scores to aid in interpretation.
Imagine a group of children waiting in line for a rollercoaster. One by one, the ride operator compares their height to a measuring stick. She observes each child carefully, making sure they meet the height requirement before they are permitted on the ride. Some children are much taller than the measuring stick and are waved through quickly, while others are much shorter and are quickly routed to the exit. The ride operator looks more closely at children that are about the same size as the measuring stick, ensuring they can ride safely before she allows them through.
Like the height requirements on rollercoasters, cut-off scores “determine whether the results from a particular measure do or do not meet some criteria identified value for a specific early childhood system, community, program or practice purpose.” These scores, and their associated descriptors, help practitioners, families, and decision-makers make sense of the scores or raw data that they reference. For example, some assessments provide cut-off scores that indicate if a pattern of scores is “of concern,” or “not of concern,” while others may use cut-off scores to indicate “age appropriate” vs. “mildly” or “significantly delayed” performance. Similarly, many early childhood screening tools use cut-off scores to help evaluators determine whether or not additional testing is warranted.
Of course, early child development is rarely static. Year after year, the same children get back in line for the rollercoaster. The children who fell below the height requirement a year ago, step eagerly up to the measuring stick. Many have grown enough to ride the rollercoaster and others will have to wait until they are just a little taller. The same is true for early childhood assessment cut-off scores. Children that fall below a specific cut-off may need time, and/or targeted intervention or supports to achieve their full potential.
Sometimes, despite being tall enough to ride, some children are simply too frightened to enjoy the rollercoaster. The minimum height requirement only measures whether or not they can ride safely but fails to evaluate their sensitivity to motion sickness or loud noises. Similarly, children that achieve a specific cut-off score target or standard may still face developmental or other challenges. As a result, early childhood evaluations should include more than one source of information including multiple assessments, caregiver input, and observations in natural settings.
Finally, amusement park owners don’t set their own, arbitrary rollercoaster height requirements. Safety commissions set initial standards and update those requirements based on new research findings and re-evaluations of the ride’s structure. While there are no mandatory requirements for the reliability and validity of early childhood assessments, professional organizations, such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA), American Psychological Association (APA), and National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), publish standards for assessment development and administration. These standards call for assessments to meet rigorous requirements for reliability and validity that include analyses of bias and regular revisions and updates.
So, the next time you find yourself boomeranging through the loop-de-loops of assessment, hold onto your grab bar and look for the cut-off scores. They may provide exactly what you need to hit the brakes, coast into the station, and successfully interpret early childhood assessments.
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