Great Expectations: Our early assessments of schoolchildren are misleading and damaging

The Early
Years Foundation Stage Profile was developed by the government's Standards
and Testing Agency "to support
practitioners in making accurate judgements about each child's attainment".
More specifically:

The EYFS Profile
summarises and describes children’s attainment at the end of the EYFS. It is
based on ongoing observation and assessment in the three prime and four
specific areas of learning, and the three characteristics of effective
learning,

• Prime areas:
communication and language; physical development; personal, social and
emotional development

• Specific areas:  literacy; mathematics; understanding the
world; expressive arts; and design of effective learning

• Characteristics:
playing and exploring;  active learning;  creating and thinking critically

… for each ELG, practitioners must judge whether a child is meeting
the level of development expected at the end of the Reception year (expected),
exceeding this level (exceeding), or not yet reaching this level (emerging).

The manual gives concrete examples of the kinds of behaviour
that meet the expected level for a given Early Learning Goal. For instance:

Understanding:
Children follow instructions involving several ideas or actions. They answer
‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about their experiences and in response to stories or
events.

Speaking: Children
express themselves effectively, showing awareness of listeners’ needs. They use
past, present and future forms accurately when talking about events that have happened
or are to happen in the future. They develop their own narratives and
explanations by connecting ideas or events.

Strikingly absent from these descriptions is any allowance
for the child's age. The timing of the assessment is specified to occur when
children are aged from 4 yrs 10 months to 5 yr 9 months.

Children's language skills (and indeed other skills) develop
rapidly in the preschool and early school years.  I first became aware of this many years ago
when I was developing a children's comprehension assessment (TROG). The goal
was to establish the typical range of performance at different ages and
subsequently use TROG to identify cases of poor comprehension in clinical
settings. The assessment involved showing children sets of four pictures and
asking them to point to the one that matched a spoken phrase or sentence.  I knew very little about developmental psychology
at the time, so I just decided to try the materials with children of different
ages to see how they reacted. It soon became apparent that there were
substantial age-related changes, and I realised that if I would need to use
four age-bands for 4-year-olds and two age-bands for 5-year-olds. Some
illustrative data are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Percentage
children getting 4/4 items correct on blocks testing specific constructions. 

From the original Test for Reception of Grammar (1983).

Findings like this are not specific to this test. I've
developed several language assessments over the years and I've used those
developed by others: they all show rapid change from 4 to 6 years.

Concerned by this, I wrote for information to the
government's Children and Early Years Data Unit, who referred me to this report.  This gives
percentages of children reaching a Good Level of Development, defined as
achieving "at least the expected
level in the early learning goals in the prime areas of learning (personal,
social and emotional development; physical development; and communication and
language) and in the specific areas of mathematics and literacy." A
Good Level of Development was obtained by 69% of autumn-born children, 59% of
spring-born children and 47% of summer-born children, confirming that the
standards used to evaluate children are sensitive to age.

This is seriously problematic for at least reasons. First,
it means we are using flawed assessments that will over-identify problems in
younger children. It is already established that in the USA attentional
deficits are over-diagnosed in summer-born children (Elder, 2010) –
a problem that has long-term consequences when children are subsequently
prescribed medication for what may actually normal behaviour in an immature
child. Making children feel that they are falling short of an expected standard
before they are 5 years old cannot be good for their development. In this
regard it is noteworthy that there is evidence that being summer-born continues
to be associated with educational disadvantage in English children through the
later school years (Crawford et
al, 2013).

A second problem is that use of inappropriate criteria for
'expected' levels of development will give a false impression of the numbers of
children with developmental difficulties. Consider this
article describing an 'early learning crisis' with '20 percent of children unable to communicate properly at age 5'. I
have a particular interest in children who have language difficulties, but
nobody is helped by over-identifying problems in children who are just the
youngest in their class. I've seen enough 4 and 5-year-olds to know that the
'early learning goals' for understanding and speaking are not realistic
'expectations' for 4-year-olds and for those who have only just turned 5 years.
Indeed, the fact that one third of the oldest children are not regarded as
having a good level of development suggests to me that the expectations are
inappropriately high even for the oldest 5-year-olds.

My colleague Courtenay Norbury, Professor in the Psychology
Dept at Royal Holloway, will shortly be publishing data from a large survey of
language development in reception class children in Surrey*. She tells me that
month of birth is once again emerging as an important factor.

I'm not someone who is opposed to assessment in principle,
but if you are going to do it, it's important to do it in an informed manner. Surely
it is time for the policy-makers in this area to recognise that their current
practices of early assessment are misleading, and have the potential to cause
damage when children are evaluated against standards that are overly stringent
and do not take age into account.

*Update 5th June 2015: This is now published as an open access 'early view' paper in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.12431/abstract