Standardized Classroom Observations from Pre-k to 3 Grade: a Mechanism for Improving Access to Consistently High Quality Classroom Experiences and Practices during the P-3 Years

Widespread and systematic use of standardized observation in classrooms from prekindergarten to third grade has the potential to address major shortcomings in educational services provided to young children. Currently there are no standardized measures available for assessing pre-kindergarten/early elementary classrooms’ contributions to child competence that could be appropriately used in a system of accountability or professional development focused on classroom quality. Also, absent an appropriate tool for observational assessment, there is no way of gauging whether programs are actually offering high quality, nor are there ways to improve program quality that focus on the actual experiences of children and teachers’ behavior in classrooms. The descriptions of classroom quality available in standardized classroom observation systems provide a standard way of measuring and noting teachers’ strengths and weaknesses and evaluating whether professional development activities are actually helping improve classroom interactions. The present paper reviews the literature on classroom observation in relation to policy and practice issues in early education, proposes a model for the use of systematic classroom observation, and describes the development and of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). The CLASS describes and measures classroom quality from pre-k to grade 3 using a common set of dimensions and rating scales, with grade-specific examples reflecting both instructional and socioemotional aspects of the classroom environment. Robert C. Pianta University of Virginia Curry School of Education 350 Old Ivy Way, Suite 100 Charlottesville, VA 22903-4897 [email protected] Early Childhood Research Collaborative—Discussion Paper 103 3 I. CONCEPTUAL, THEORETICAL, AND POLICY ISSUES The Policy/Practice/Professional Development Context for Classroom Observation Issues being debated within several policy arenas provide support for the need for a more systematic and focused effort to document the quality of young children’s experiences in early education classrooms. These involve accountability and readiness, the focus on program quality and issues of access to high quality educational programming for young children, and professional development. Accountability and readiness. In the current education policy climate there is a very strong emphasis on accountability, particularly that schools and classrooms should be held more responsible for the outcomes they produce (e.g., child achievement). However, the mechanisms for ensuring accountability rest entirely on direct assessment of children, typically starting in third grade, but increasingly initiated at younger ages, even extending into Head Start programming. This tendency to view direct assessment of children as the only means for ensuring accountability of classrooms and schools is quite limited, especially for young children when school readiness is the focus of assessment, policy, and programming. The technical adequacy (reliability, validity) of direct assessments for young children is widely recognized as lower than that of older children in large part because children’s competences are fairly unstable and situationally dependent (La Paro & Pianta, 2000). Furthermore, because the competencies of children are in large part dependent on the quality of their experiences in educational (and family) settings, it makes logical sense to assess, for accountability purposes, the quality of those settings—in short to have accountability standards for classrooms (Pianta, La Paro, Payne, Cox,