SBIR Phase II: Facilitating Early Childhood Teacher and Family Engagement During COVID-19

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to ease the burden on early childhood teachers and ensure they have the information needed to support children’s learning. COVID-19 has upended the lives of millions of children and families and disproportionately affected low-income children. The incoming class of preschoolers have increasingly variable levels of development and skills than ever before, and educators need to assess their need and help them to catch up academically. The industry leading tools in early childhood assessment rely solely on observation-based assessment, in which teachers make judgments about a child’s performance based on observations made in the classroom. Observation-based measures have limitations, including time burden, teacher bias, and variability in scoring due to differences in teacher education and training. Observational assessment is especially challenging in the remote context, since teachers were not able to physically monitor children’s development. Even when children are back in the classroom, face masks may shield some of the more subtle cues around learning and development.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to ensure an accurate assessment of child development, so that teachers can leverage the data for tailored instruction to help children catch up from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Child assessments are typically observational or direct. This Phase II project collects both observational and direct data, providing an opportunity to compare the data and help teachers understand areas where there may be assessment error due to teacher bias or other factors. At the end of Phase II, it is anticipated that teachers will have access to a self-led teacher training and reliability certification, which may help to ensure a more consistent assessment experience in the classroom. Moreover, educational programs will have access to an assessment quality monitoring dashboard that seeks to highlight differences between observation and game-based assessment scores and provide a path towards reconciliation. Educational programs may be able to customize this technology to fit the needs of English language learners, who are often subject to assessor bias. Finally, teachers may be able to leverage the game-based assessments to understand both academic and “soft” skill development. Overall, the technology may\provide teachers with a robust child assessment system that helps them to accurately and efficiently assess whole child development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.