Sprig Learning builds personalized, culturally relevant early learning assessments and resources that support schools, teachers, families, and students. 

In building these early learning programs, there are certain measures we take to provide the best learning experience for students. One of them is reducing implicit bias. 

Bias is inherent to all of us and is caused by personal experience, experience of others, cultural norms, the information we process, and the values in our education systems. Typically, we hear of two primary forms of bias:

1. Implicit bias. This is an automatic or unconscious reaction someone has toward other people. These attitudes and stereotypes can negatively impact our understanding, actions, and decision-making.

2. Explicit bias. This is the traditional conceptualization of bias. With explicit bias, individuals are aware of their prejudices and attitudes toward certain groups. Positive or negative preferences for a particular group are conscious. 

For this blog, we will focus on implicit bias and its impact on education. In early learning, educators and staff all have implicit biases when supporting their students. Given that bias is a product of our experiences, it is not desirable nor possible to eliminate. 

However, understanding and identifying bias, and its systemic impact on actions and outcomes at scale, is indeed possible — and essential in our efforts to counteract the harmful effects of bias on learning in the classroom.  Because the early years are a crucial juncture in the life of schoolchildren, the onus is on us to mitigate the effects of implicit bias as much as possible.

 

What is the Role of Implicit Bias in Early Learning

Given that educators have such an important part to play in the development and growth of young children, implicit bias affects their understanding of situations, decisions and actions. 

With implicit bias, the educator may be unaware that biases, rather than the facts of a situation, are driving his or her decision-making. This behavior is often labelled interchangeably as ‘unconscious bias’.

It is something that is not limited to people either. Implicit bias permeates throughout education resources, assessments, content, and processes, tracing back to their creator. 

The risk with implicit bias is not just how they make students feel, but also the impact the bias produces.

Affecting students’ attitudes and feelings can discourage early learners  from expressing themselves, and also creates the potential for students to learn from and develop their own biases themselves. 

Bias also affects learning by impacting the quality of assessments. When the outcome of assessments are affected negatively by implicit bias, it impacts the future learning outcomes of students.

 

Mitigating Early Learning Implicit Biases

While removing all bias may be inescapable, there are things that can be done to mitigate it.

 

Use a Mix of Formal and Informal Formative Assessments

• National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) recommends the use of both formal and informal screening to assess children’s growth across all domains of development and learning. 

Indeed, there is a time and place for both types of assessments. Formal assessments occur at regular intervals in a structured setting, while it’s best if informal assessments occur every single day and are integrated into the teaching process .

How it mitigates bias: The more singular and isolated an assessment is, the greater the reliance on it to support the child’s learning and to determine the outcome of the student. 

Screenings are necessary to detect where a child is in terms of their learning development, but they should be complimented by formative assessments, which can be both formal and informal in nature.

With ongoing and regular opportunities to assess throughout the school year, it’s more likely that educators acquire a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of all the situational factors that affect learning in the student’s life.

 

Use Culturally Responsive Assessments

• NAEYC further recommends that assessments be culturally, linguistically and individually appropriate and address all of children’s development, progress, strengths and needs.

The average classroom is more diverse than it has ever been, so it’s important to develop culturally responsive assessments. Looking at data from 2015, nearly 1 in 4 kids who attended public schools in the US spoke a language other than English in their home. In total, 176 different languages are spoken in New York City public schools. 

As demonstrated above, when left unconscious – biases can influence assessments for early learners, altering the potential learning trajectories for children. For example, this can sometimes lead to identification and assignment of an Individualized Education Program (IEP), labeling the learner for the remainder of their school career. 

While the extra funding and support that an IEP provides has plenty of benefit for learners in need, this labeling has also proven to lower self esteem, lower expectations from teachers and parents, and peer issues.

Outside of potential bias in the development of these screens and instruments themselves, there is implicit bias during the delivery of the assessment as well. Canadian researchers Ungerlieder and Riley document situations where teachers have lower expectations for Indigenous students in their classrooms relative to their non-Indigenous students. 

Lowered expectations often influence teachers’ appraisals of Indigenous students and introduce bias into their scoring practices.

How it mitigates bias: Culturally responsive assessment involves being focused on the student, and ensuring their involvement throughout the entire assessment process. Many children grow up speaking a language other than English at home and are exposed to a variety of cultures and transitions that are not always visible in a school setting.

When students are able to see their language and culture reflected in the curriculum and classroom assessments, they are more likely to engage and be successful.

When cultural and linguistic experiences are accounted for in assessments, this improves the accuracy of the results and ultimately increases student learning.

 

Make the Assessment Process More Comprehensive

• Sprig Learning recommends a holistic, 360 degree view of early learning experiences in the home, school and community. To do this effectively, and reduce the potential fear and anxiety around assessments, teachers help provide context for the material prior to the assessment.  This includes befriending a puppet who plays a key role at assessment time and practicing  the 3-point scale used during the assessment.

Connecting the school to the home and the larger community is so important because it helps to fill in the blanks when it comes to understanding a child. The assessment itself is connected to the rest of school activities. It compliments the daily routine in an early years classroom. From the student’s perspective, assessment looks and feels like a normal day. 

How it mitigates bias: By collecting different perspectives on learning from the teachers, parents, other caregivers and most importantly the students themselves, this limits the potential bias in the overall, holistic assessment.. 

When it comes to the actual assessment, students are able to interact with the technology directly (like an iPAD) and demonstrate their learning. This reduces any subjective observations, and possible implicit bias, that a teacher may bring to that observation. As teachers sit beside and  guide the student through the assessments, they are also able to observe the child and their learning. 

Observational assessment is extremely important.  Over the course of the year, teachers are also able to track the learning portfolios of children, noticing the body of work they have completed to identify strengths and learning gaps. 

Dr. Grace from the Little School talks about the importance of observations and portfolios in assessing children. She calls portfolios “a collection of authentic assessments” and says that observations can help educators to arrange the environment and develop curricular plans and materials.

Thus, by adopting a comprehensive view and by using portfolios as a part of assessments, it’s easy to keep everyone in the loop about the progress of the child.

 

Reliance on Standardization and Implicit Bias

Standardized tests are normative in that they compare a child to their peers who are of the same age. Some standardized tests can further drill down results by gender, socio-economic and cultural background. 

But not every standardized test will use exact segmentation for fair comparison. Even if they do, such standardized tests are often meant to discriminate between groups of students, but not always test for behaviors that are educationally relevant. 

Relying on standardized tests alone does not yield direct information for choosing curricular content, deciding on environmental factors and guiding instructional strategies. 

In fact, when comparison is the only learning goal, there is a higher likelihood of implicit bias. 

Afterall, it’s meant to only categorize students into different levels, but not actually make the connection to differentiated instruction that supports individuals and groups of students.

 

Alternate Approaches to Reduce Implicit Bias

Alternative approaches are beneficial when it comes to early learning assessments.  

A comprehensive and holistic approach can be undertaken if there is adequate collaboration between teachers and caregivers. It’s something Sprig embraces wholeheartedly. 

When there is a comprehensive outlook on childhood development, the interrelationships between developmental domains are evident. While standardization targets everything as a separate subject, holistic learning looks at the linkage between multiple domains such as: motor skill development, oral language, numeracy and literacy. It makes use of portfolio and dynamic assessments, which are considered alternate approaches.

Portfolio assessments usually involve activities in and out of the classroom. Different learning materials such as animated stories and levelled readers are used, so there are enough things to interest early learners as they progress through the curriculum.

Dynamic assessments consider both the role of the educator and the child in assessments. Instead of just being an observer, they play a supportive role during the assessment whereby the students can also use the assessment as a learning opportunity.

It reduces the Hawthorne Effect, which is a type of bias where individuals being studied modify their behavior because of the awareness of being observed. 

It’s why dynamic assessments are so important where educators take the trouble to immerse themselves in the process as well, so assessments feel like an activity, and not a test.

 

Uncovering Old Bias to Move Forward

Holistic assessments accept that learning is a journey that begins at birth and continues throughout the early childhood years into adolescence. 

Two students may get different marks on a summative assessment despite both of them having completed all homework, tasks and activities related to the assessment. 

In such scenarios, it is likely that there was a gap in prior grade levels. This too can surface in the form of implicit bias, where we take completion as a sign of understanding, not realizing that the learning material did not always make sense to all students.

In the case two students have different rates of completion of tasks and activities, such discrepancy can often be explained by skill gaps. It’s not the missed work that is producing different results, but often the different skill gaps that were not previously addressed.

Based on any mistakes, it’s possible to target instruction and provide enough scaffolding to young students to help them address those mistakes and move on to the next grade level. But it doesn’t address the root of the problem—old implicit biases.

Rather than measuring standards from the current grade level, holistic assessments look at the whole life of the child to uncover missed learning opportunities. 

But is there even such a thing as missed learning? We round up this article with a case study.

 

A Case Study to Reduce Implicit Bias

Lindsay Unified School District (LUSD) in California looked at growth data segmented by groups such as English Learner, Migrant and Homeless. These groups had made significant progress during the pandemic compared to the rest of the groups. 

Had LUSD only relied on national reports focusing only on learning loss, it would have missed this opportunity to provide personalized support to groups that were showing promise. LUSD uses real-time data from formative assessments to personalize learning at the classroom level.

Such a case demonstrates a strengths-based approach where the bias is not in uncovering a threat in time, but rather missing an opportunity. It reminds us that there is so much hope in igniting the passion of learning in young students if only we are able to mitigate bias.

If you have not considered alternate approaches to standardized assessments, there is a good case to be made for them. Secondly, whatever approach you adopt, it’s important to supplement the process with equally diverse learning materials.

Learn more about how Sprig’s AI Engine reduces implicit bias in classrooms.

Sprig Learning helps every child succeed by uncovering and supporting their unique learning strengths, needs, and interests. One of the ways this is achieved is through formative classroom assessments. 

What are assessments? Every teacher uses them to some extent to assess learning. At the very least, report cards and progress report cards are issued as early as kindergarten and continue until high-school graduation. Most schools also participate in some form of standardized testing at certain grades. 

The shortcomings of current assessments are aplenty, but they are often brought to the surface whenever learning has been disrupted. 

COVID-19 is one such disruption. Many words, such as “learning loss”, are used to describe what happened as a result of the missed learning opportunities caused by school closures.

Across the world, we know that learning for 1.6 billion students was disrupted by the recent pandemic. While remote and hybrid learning struggled to engage many students, it is estimated that 463 million students had no access to virtual learning whatsoever.

A significant portion of young students in the US are said to be a minimum of 1, 3 and even 6 months behind where they would usually be at this time in the school year. Distance learning has affected disadvantaged communities disproportionately, as those neighborhoods have had a higher likelihood of school closures and limited to no access to learning

But did you know there is a learning disruption every year during summer? In what is termed the “summer slide”, kids return to classrooms in September following two months of no formal learning.  

We have always had a range of readiness among students in the school year. This year, there is a greater number of students on the lower end of the readiness scale and it is more palpable, because of the longer interruption. 

To address this, there needs to be an increased focus on the unique strengths and learning needs of each individual child. 

In order to accelerate learning this school year, formative assessments (either formal or informal) need to be an early and regular practice in the classroom. For schools that had not established regular, formative assessments prior to the pandemic, it’s unlikely that they have the means now to understand what stage their returning students are at in their development. 

Based on a poll of educators and entrepreneurs, only 1 in 5 of America’s K-12 students have experienced formative assessments. There is more ground to cover. The following paragraph delves into the reasons why formative assessments are especially important in early childhood education.

 

The Special Significance of Early Childhood Assessments

Assessments in preschool through grade 3 are of special importance in early childhood education. There is a litany of statistics that all say one thing—from birth to 8 years of age, it is a critical milestone to  build a solid foundation and maximize learning.

Assessing the developmental milestones that are achieved therefore is of the highest importance. It’s why formative assessments are suited to the cause, which collect timely and relevant data as a child progresses in their learning skills and abilities. 

Also at this stage of a child’s life, it’s a team effort to educate and care for the young learner.

It’s via the assessment, that teachers, administrators and parents are able to support the learning that is needed.  

Formative assessments inform teacher planning, they enable educator and family partnerships and they provide necessary information for program quality evaluation.

Teachers have the all important role of instructing children in the formative years. Assessments allow them to uncover student strengths and learning opportunities. 

They are able to differentiate and even individualize instruction where necessary, so early learners are matched with the right activities for optimal development. 

The student’s parents have the important responsibility of partnering with teachers to see how they can best support their child’s learning at home. Assessments reveal certain areas that need to be worked on and the progress made on each area of development. 

Communication here should be two-way, where teachers and parents share knowledge with each other to help the young student grow and mature as a learner. 

Program administrators and policy makers have the important mandate to monitor student’s development in the early years and address emerging issues. Decisions need to be made where to focus efforts, so there is continual improvement year-in and year-out. 

Whether it’s new teaching materials or the need for further professional development, formative assessments are good indicators of how a program is doing.

 

Considerations on How to Best Assess Early Learners During Their Formative Years

Many things have to be considered when devising an assessment method for early learners. For many young children, it’s the first time they are out of a home setting for an elongated period of time. 

Educators and other early childhood education professionals have to be especially considerate of all information gathered from early learning assessments.

Here are some considerations when choosing the right assessment method. Often, a combination of methods is used to build a learning profile for the young student. So while formative assessments are preferred, they may have different types of qualities as covered in the considerations below.

Consideration: Control

Children-Led vs Adult-Led 

Children can assess themselves, in what is known as “self-assessment.” Having “conversations” with educators is another assessment method that is closer to a child-led assessment. 

“Observation” is both child- and adult-lead, as children demonstrate their skills while educators observe how it’s done. 

“Setting tasks” is an assessment method that is more adult-led. Finally, testing is the best example of an adult-led assessment, where educators control the whole environment.

Consideration: Perspectives

One Point of View vs Many Points of View

At-home environments can be very different from at-school environments. Some children are exposed to different languages or cultures at home and have the challenge of reconciling those differences in a school setting. 

When assessing children, it’s important to not just gather the teacher’s perspective, but also the perspective of the child’s parents, and even the perspective of the wider community who also have chances to interact with the child. It’s one of the many characteristics of holistic learning. 

Opportunities to collaborate and share information must be provided to all these parties because they spend time with the child in different learning environments. Thus, they have inputs which make assessments more fair and accurate. The point of view of the early learner must also be taken into account, which is reflective of a more child-led assessment as mentioned prior.

Consideration: Frequency

Regular vs Once

Formative assessments deal with the day-to-day learning process as it unfolds. These assessments are integrated into the daily teaching practices and are ongoing. They can be both formal and informal. 

Summative assessments are used for reporting purposes. They provide a snapshot of all the learning that happened for a specific period of time. These assessments occur only at certain times of the year and are fixed.

While a formative assessment is “for learning”, a summative assessment is “of learning”. There is a third category of learning that is both formative and summative. It is the “assessment as learning” 

Children are being assessed for what they have learned, but are also learning from the assessment experience. This aligns more closely to formative assessments than summative assessments. 

When the student’s perspective is prioritized, they are allowed “do overs”, and the right interventions are applied following every single assessment. This is a very advanced practice of formative assessment based on real-time data and an attitude of helping rather than penalizing.

Consideration: Timeline

Diagnostic vs Standardized

This is a very interesting spectrum, where the two ends are more similar to each other than what lies in between. 

Diagnostic assessments are used to screen preschoolers or kindergartners when they first enter the school system. Such screening programs are usually developed by companies and administered by educators. It’s a very similar case with standardized testing which first takes place in grade 3 or 4 in Canada and the US. 

But what happens in between is key. That’s where a lot of the early learning growth and development occurs. If school systems were focused primarily on assessment screens and summative testing,  there is valuable data that is not being collected in a timely manner and subsequently not being used to support learning in the prime formative years. Important data such as student performance, behavior, attitudes, characteristics, motivations, interests, literacy skills, math skills, cultural backgrounds etc. 

Measuring such breadth of data is so instrumental to student success, that large government programs like Early Head Start and Head Start lists tables of performance indicators of school readiness. But once in school, should not the same rigor be applied in continually measuring such things? It leads us to think…..

 

When Is the Right Time to Assess?

Assessments, in the form of screenings, can first happen before children are placed in preschool. These assessments often screen for health and developmental milestones, but also other factors that determine preschool readiness. It includes social-emotional maturity and the ability to handle basic self-care tasks.

Kindergarten assessments or screenings are more common. Usually, they not only assess self-care skills, but also language skills, cognitive skills, and fine and gross motor skills. More than 25 states in the US require some sort of kindergarten entrance assessments.

Regular assessments from kindergarten to grade 3  tend to fade out or are very targeted or restricted to report cards only. 

Yes, educators have always used their own formative assessments in some shape or form such as administering quizzes or observing group work or individual tasks. But there is a lack of comprehensive formative assessment systems that apply differentiated instruction by regularly collecting data on daily and weekly learning.

 

What Are the Principles of Assessment?

In stating the top 20 principles of early childhood education, the American Psychological Association dedicates principles 18 to 20 to assessment. 

To summarize the principles: formative and summative assessments need to complement each other. The assessment processes must be valid and reliable with well-defined standards for quality and fairness. Assessment data must be interpreted appropriately. 

Holistic learning is a pedagogical approach that takes into account all of the aforementioned principles. It administers ongoing formative assessments that consider multiple points of view, including that of the student. As such, it is very careful in how the results of the assessment are interpreted to reduce bias. 

Besides formative assessments, there are actual diagnostic assessments as well which are more summative in nature and which identify the strengths, interests and challenges of each student. It establishes the base from which subsequent formative assessments can be applied to measure progress. 

It is an evidence-based system of learning that focuses not only on cognitive development, but also emotional, physical and spiritual development. Given its comprehensive outlook, it is open to understanding all the ways in which a child may develop, and thus qualifies for appropriate interpretation.

 

Choosing An Assessment System

A school can either choose a program-developed assessment tool that meets its specific needs, or a published assessment tool off the shelf that is more general and suited to assessments only. While both are  validated as tools for measuring early childhood development, there are tradeoffs. 

With the former, you can pick a platform that aligns well with your program goals, such as supporting students beyond the classroom setting, or enabling teachers to apply differentiated instruction. With the latter, you can more accurately measure the constructs that interest you and compare them to local, regional and national standards, but it may not have the practical functionality of supporting all critical stakeholders like the former. 

What’s important is that formative assessments become a standard feature of the education system and are reflected in the curriculum planning for school districts.

Sprig Learning is committed towards facilitating learning for all students, and especially those who need it most due to the recent pandemic learning loss . We are equally as committed to building a system where there is comprehensive and timely insight on student progress, so the linkage between home and school is not suddenly severed in case of future disruptions. 

It’s more than just helping students catch up. It’s about introducing a more student-centric assessment system, where everyone supporting the child has the information and tools they need to support their early learning. 

To learn more about holistic assessments and how they are implemented in schools, please do get in touch with us.