• Understanding Children's Early Development and Learning
• Conceptualizing Readiness
• Measurement Issues
• Conclusions and Recommendations
• References

The profile of school readiness these data provide is particularly important in two respects-for understanding the levels of children's early development and learning at entry into kindergarten and for advancing how we conceptualize the construct of "readiness." The data tell a fascinating story about the breadth and diversity of children's abilities upon entering school. At the same time, this report demonstrates that we have not yet resolved all the methodological issues related to measuring young children's development and learning; in this regard, the report is useful for pointing us along the next steps toward improving our measurements.

These comprehensive kindergarten-entry data, based on a nationally representative sample of children, have the potential to stimulate new research that will inform our understanding of the relative importance of the several dimensions of learning and development. In this first report, NCES has focused its analyses on descriptions of the diversity of the entering students in relative terms. We learn, for example, that children score higher on many dimensions if they are older, have mothers with higher levels of education, live in two-parent families, and are part of families that have not received and are not receiving public assistance. These same demographic variables frequently are found to be important predictors of school achievement in the higher grades; it is now clear, if anyone had doubts, that these differences are present at the very beginning of formal schooling. It remains for future analyses to tell us how schools will cope with this diversity and whether they will be able to alter the expected trajectories that demographic characteristics so often foretell: What will happen to at-risk students in the class of 2011? Will those in future classes meet the same fate?

What will happen will depend, in part, on how we act on the messages within America's Kindergartners. The report makes clear that there is considerable diversity even in terms of the extent to which demographics relate to what children know and can do when they begin kindergarten. Even though, on average, kindergartners whose mothers have more education do better in math, 7 percent of children whose mothers have less than a high school education score in the highest quartile in mathematics. Even though, on average, kindergartners from one-parent families score lower in reading, 14 percent of children with single mothers score in the highest quartile on the reading assessments. Even though the average kindergartner who is older when entering kindergarten scores higher in general knowledge, 12 percent of the youngest entering kindergartners score in the highest quartile on those measures. Can we learn how those children beat the odds? Can we learn what in the lives or circumstances of those children led them to perform so much better than expected? Attempting to answer these questions may make it possible for the story of "America's kindergartners in 2000," or in 2002 or 2004, to play out differently from the story of those who entered in 1998.

Five years ago, the Technical Planning Group for the first national education goal published a landmark analysis of the dimensions of children's development and learning (Kagan, Moore, and Bredekamp 1995). Up until then, local educators, state and federal policymakers, and parents conceptualized readiness in narrow terms-as, in many quarters, they still do-with so-called academic skills being the first ones brought to mind by the term "readiness." However, it is now increasingly recognized that children will be successful in school only if they begin with a broad array of knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes (Love, Aber, and Brooks-Gunn 1994). America's Kindergartners is the first substantial data collection and analysis that takes a comprehensive view of school readiness that is largely aligned with the vision of the first national education goal.

In breaking new ground in this way, NCES suggests that readiness has four dimensions: cognitive skills and knowledge, social skills, physical health and well-being, and approaches to learning. Language and literacy, which constituted a fifth dimension for the Goal One Technical Planning Group, is encompassed by cognitive skills and knowledge in the NCES framework. The Goal One Technical Planning Group also stressed the importance of three conditions that support readiness: access to quality preschool programs, parents as their child's first teacher, and receipt of appropriate nutrition and health care. America's Kindergartners addresses these supporting conditions by presenting data on the child care or preschool experiences children have had before kindergarten and on child and family interactions (including parents reading to their children).

So, do we now know how "ready" America's children are when they begin kindergarten? Not exactly. We do know, for example, that first-time kindergartners are generally healthy, that only about 10 percent are seen by their teachers as often to very often exhibiting such problem behaviors as easily getting angry, that 66 percent are proficient in recognizing their letters, that 29 percent understand beginning sounds of words, that almost all (94 percent) are proficient in numbers and shapes, and that 71 percent are seen by their teachers as often to very often persisting at tasks. We do not know, however, what the schools expect of these children; nor do we know how their new teachers respond to these levels of behavior and performance. Those who expected this report to tell us whether, "by the year 2000, all children in American will start school ready to learn," may be disappointed. But for many of us who have been struggling with conceptualizing "readiness," the report strikes the appropriate balance by focusing on the dimensions of children's learning and development without entering into the fray of the readiness debate.

America's Kindergartners also demonstrates that a full conceptualization of readiness requires multiple measurement approaches and the incorporation of multiple perspectives in order to obtain a complete picture of the extent to which children may be prepared to succeed in school. Data come from three sources: direct performance assessments of children (as in the assessments of reading, general knowledge, and mathematical concepts), ratings by teachers (on such dimensions as prosocial behaviors and task persistence), and ratings by parents (also on such dimensions as prosocial behaviors and task persistence). One of these methods alone could not provide the comprehensive picture of children's development and learning that this report displays. At the same time, however, we must realize that all measurement approaches do not provide the same type of information.

Direct assessments can give an absolute measure of a construct (for example, whether or not a child can identify the ordinal position of an object in a sequence). Teacher and parent ratings, on the other hand, provide assessments based on the adults' judgments. For example, children are rated as "often" or "very often" eager to learn, or teachers and parents rate children as "often" or "very often" persisting at tasks-with these ratings made in relation to other children the teachers and parents know. Our understanding of the social skills and approaches to learning of America's kindergartners is largely limited to such ratings. The existence of these data in a national data set is a huge step forward, yet we will be able to know and understand even more about children's social skills and approaches to learning when direct assessments tell us, for example, that when children are presented with standard tasks, 75 percent demonstrate task persistence. Only then will our profile of children's performance in their approaches to learning or social skills parallel our profile of their achievements in cognitive development, language, and general knowledge.

Throughout this commentary, I have invoked the notion of school readiness even though NCES did not claim that its assessments provide such a measure. I have done so because it seems likely that many readers will interpret these findings as evidence of the extent to which children are or are not prepared to succeed in school. In fact, the authors of America's Kindergartners are appropriately cautious in their interpretations of the data. They focus on the relative features of the data-the extent to which entering kindergartners vary along all dimensions of learning and development. Future analyses will undoubtedly address the meaning and importance of the absolute levels. I hope that we will soon learn more about such questions as these: "Given the nature and quality of the school contexts in which the new students find themselves, how well can children with different levels of cognition and knowledge, social skills, physical health and well-being, and approaches to learning be expected to perform?" "How do the varying extent and quality of pre-kindergarten program experiences contribute to success in school?" and "How do variations in school contexts mediate children's performance as they move through the early elementary grades?"

With the publication of America's Kindergartners , policy- makers, educators, and parents must adopt a comprehensive view of school readiness. The stage is now set not only for describing the diversity among entering kindergartners along the critical dimensions of their learning and development, as this report does, but for analyzing the causes and consequences of this diversity, as future reports may do.

Finally, the research accomplishments demonstrated in America's Kindergartners must not lead to complacency in our approaches to measuring children's early learning and development. In a number of key areas-most notably, social skills and approaches to learning-we still depend far more than we should on the judgment of teachers and parents. As valuable as these perceptions are for understanding children's development, we must continue to seek progress in direct assessment methods that will provide the same measurement rigor we have when assessing cognitive and language skills.