Robust investment in early childhood education can help expand children’s access to high-quality pre-K programs. These investments can also strengthen the ability of educators to gather valuable information about young children’s behaviors, skills, and competencies in order to make better decisions about how to support their learning and development. This is a critical need: Pre-K programs currently lack accurate, reliable, and routine data about children’s skills and competencies. At the same time, inequities in the design and use of early learning assessments to inform decision-making mirror disparities in access to and experiences of high-quality pre-K programs and subsequent outcomes based on children’s race, ethnicity, language, and geographic location. Most existing assessments have been developed with insights drawn from study samples of children from predominantly White, English-speaking, middle- to upper-income families. This imbalance masks the important skills and competencies of children from racially and linguistically marginalized communities.

The purpose of this brief is to provide a resource to help the early childhood field use a strengths- and assets-based lens to identify and measure the skills and competencies of an increasingly diverse population of young learners in pre-K. It begins by describing some of the limitations in current early learning assessments and highlights the implications of using assessments that are not designed with and for historically margin­alized groups of children, namely children of color and those from linguistically diverse backgrounds. The brief then draws on the existing literature to identify content-focused opportunities to address shortcomings in existing assessment tools: (1) acknowledging cultural and linguistic strengths in children from historically marginalized groups, and (2) expanding measurement within domains of interest to elevate a broader range of strengths and competencies for these children. With this information, the field will have better information to help design pre-K programs that support all children’s development over time.