Alignment: A Missing Link in Early Childhood Transitions?

Throughout the course of life, all adults make transitions, so do young children. Because young children are more vulnerable in general and they have experienced far fewer transitions than adults, they often experience greater challenges. As a result, the field of early childhood education has historically expended much effort in understanding and improving children's transitions from preschool to school. This article suggests that many of these past efforts, however well intentioned, may have missed a significant element of transitions: a focused emphasis on the alignment of standards, curriculum, and assessments "within" prekindergarten and kindergarten and "between" prekindergarten and kindergarten. The authors conducted a small pilot study in four communities that promoted the transition from pre-K to kindergarten in order to examine the important implications of this alignment in relation to young children's transition from one setting to another. Analyses of the four sites' documents consistently revealed that horizontal alignment of standards, curricula, and assessments was greater in prekindergarten than in kindergarten while vertical alignment was nearly non existent.