Assessment in Early Literacy Research

Much of what we know about children’s language and literacy development derives from efforts to assess those skills. In fact, language and literacy development might be taken as a case study in the history of assessment—a local domain which displays the full range of tensions, challenges, and approaches that have characterized the field of behavioral assessment, and in particular, the assessment of young children. In this chapter, we discuss language and literacy assessment in young children as an illustrative special case of issues that extend far beyond the language/literacy domain. In that larger domain, as in this specific one, three key questions organize the information: For what purposes should we assess young children? What aspects of their functioning should be assessed? And how do we carry out assessments so as to get good, reliable information with only modest burden on the adult assessor or the child