Grant Will Cover New Assessment for Kindergarten Students
Early education officials are expanding some programs and services thanks to a $51 million federal grant. Part of the money will be used to develop an assessment to see if kids are ready for Kindergarten.
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Parents, you can relax. Your five-year-old won’t have to take a standardized test. Melissa Fincher is the deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability for the Georgia Department of Education. She says the Kindergarten assessment will be informal.
“So, it’ll be very naturalistic and very developmentally appropriate,” Fincher says. “It’s activities; it might be some counting, some sorting, that kind of thing, just natural things that would go on in Kindergarten and the teachers just observing the kids and noting who might have skills and who might need a little bit of shoring up.”
Fincher says the new system will augment Georgia’s existing assessment called the Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developmental Skills, or GKIDS.
The Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Grant was awarded to Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning. But DECAL is collaborating with K-12 officials on the Kindergarten assessment piece. Fincher says the new tool will help officials determine whether kids are getting the skills they need in Pre-K.
The assessment is being developed now. It will be implemented during the 2016-2017 school year.
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