Estimating measurement error in child language assessments administered by daycare educators in large scale intervention studies.

The study investigates how much margin of error kindergarten teachers get when they administer a test of language and pre-reading skills in children aged three to five years old. The research question is: How well can kindergarten teachers perform language assessments in Danish kindergartens?

The results show that the margin of error for kindergarten teachers who performed language assessments on the children varied between different language subtests and was between 4% and 19%. The researchers behind the study emphasise that there are currently no data on how much measurement error would occur if speech therapists were to perform the same assessments in a nationwide study. This information would complete the overall picture of how accurate kindergarten teachers' assessments were.

The data are taken from the SPELL and LEAP projects, both of which are studies testing the effectiveness of language and reading interventions for children between three and five years of age, in a real-life setting. In both studies, kindergarten teachers assessed the children’s language skills before the interventions started. The pre-test results from both studies were used in this study. A total of 5759 children (48% girls and 11% bilingual) from 14 Danish municipalities were included in the analyses.

Haghish, E. F., Vach, W., Højen, A. & Bleses, D. (2021). "Estimating measurement error in child language assessments administered by daycare educators in large scale intervention studies". PloS one, 16(11):e0255414.