Chapter 9: Gender Equity in Early Childhood Assessment

In recent years, Congress and national organizations have focused attention on assessment practices for young children. In 1994, the U.S. Congress charged the National Goals Panel to “create clear guidelines regarding the nature, functions, and uses of early childhood assessments, including assessment formats that are appropriate for use in culturally and linguistically diverse communities, based on model elements of school readiness” (Shepard, Kagan, & Wurtz, 1998). The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists (NAECS) recommended that assessments, as a central part of early childhood education programs, be (a) ethical, appropriate, valid, and reliable; (b) developmentally appropriate; (c) culturally and linguistically responsive; (d) related to the child’s real world; (e) understood by teachers through their own professional development; (f) inclusive of families; and (g) connected to best practice and research in teaching and learning, interventions, and program improvement (NAEYC & NAECS/SDE, 2003). The National Association of School Psychologists (2004) agreed that early childhood assessment practices should be nondiscriminatory in terms of ethnicity, native language, family composition, and/or socioeconomic status. However, this group added the critical component of gender to the expectations of appropriate assessment for young children. The addition of gender is significant, as there has been limited focus on this equity issue in early childhood assessment.