Supporting young immigrant children and dual language learners in early education: Examining the role of families in early childhood assessment

Abstract

Despite growing numbers of immigrant children and dual language learners (DLL) in the United States, their learning is often marginalized. Early childhood education (ECE) assessments, such as school readiness measures, are one example in which the strengths of immigrant and dual language learners (DLL) are missing. Further, many current ECE assessments face issues of reliability and validity with immigrant and DLL populations. In this thesis, I aim to address these issues by exploring two potential ways of creating family-based school readiness measures. I first use data from the National Household Education Surveys (NHES) Program of 2019 (N =2,644) to simulate a parent-reported school readiness measure with immigrant (and non-immigrant) families and find reliability and validity of evidence for this approach. Second, I propose to co-design with immigrant and DLL families a new family-based school readiness measure. Such a measure has the potential to facilitate immigrant and DLL children’s learning and inform much needed changes to policies in order to leverage immigrant and DLL children’s diverse assets.