Early Childhood Testing and School Learning Problems: A Cross-Validation

Educators in the early school grades often find themselves in a dilemma when evaluating children's skills. Formal testing procedures are often inappropriate for young children and can wrongly identify them as deficient. The purpose of this study was to help teachers in making early decisions regarding individual children that would be accurate and helpful in designing educational programs. A screener was identified during the first year that discriminated between kindergarten children identified by their teachers as high-achieving or low-achieving. The results of a subsequent cross-validation yielded a relationship between the screener and the teachers' evaluations that was statistically significant.