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AEPS Sales Specialists are ready to answer your questions |
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How does AEPS support best practice for assessment in early childhood?
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AEPS is a curriculum-based assessment developed as a strong alternative to norm-referenced tests to support the delivery of quality instruction and intervention. AEPS meets NAEYC and DEC guidelines for early childhood assessment and supports best practice in the following critical ways:
- AEPS is an authentic assessment that relies on observations of a child in natural learning environments (e.g., home, classroom) during everyday activities (e.g., play, mealtime) rather than in a contrived arrangement in an unfamiliar testing room.
- AEPS permits modifications and accommodations for individual differences and needs and is sensitive to small increments of change in children's behaviors.
- AEPS links test items directly to effective interventions to inform programming and ensure that children make progress over time.
- Assessment with AEPS is collaborative, relying on the observations of multiple practitioners, and ensures that parents contribute by observing and making judgments as team members. AEPS tools such as the Family Report and Child Progress Record keep families involved across all phases of assessment, intervention, and evaluation.
- AEPS consists of functional, measurable, and teachable skills that are meaningful to the child and family in everyday life. For example, rather than focusing on whether a child can fit 8 pegs into a test pegboard, AEPS assesses how the child is able to fit his own real-life items into his defined spaces.
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How does AEPS work in the classroom setting? In the home setting? In the clinical setting?
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The AEPS Curriculum is activity-based, meaning that interventions are embedded into children's natural daily activities, play, and routines; therefore, it can be used across a variety of settings throughout the day. The observations of children required for the AEPS Test can similarly happen wherever the child is, whether in the classroom, at home, or in a clinical setting.
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How long does the AEPS Test take to complete? Can the AEPS Test be given in isolation, or can components be measured during the instructional day?
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We generally recommend that the AEPS Test be administered over a 2-week period in order to permit observations of the child in a variety of activities throughout the days. The AEPS Test (Volume 2 of the second print edition of AEPS) and AEPSi contain sets of assessment activities that cover all of the AEPS Test items and enable assessment of up to six children at a time as they participate in routine and planned activities throughout the instructional day.
The AEPS Test is not typically administered in isolation; as an authentic assessment, the AEPS Test is recommended to be conducted through observation of children's behavior during the activities of the day. However, in situations where observers do not have the opportunity to observe specific behaviors during routine activities, they may create a situation designed to directly test the behavior.
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How does AEPS request and use input from parents? What functions does AEPS have for reporting to parents?
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An integral part of assessment with AEPS, the AEPS Family Report provides parents and caregivers with the opportunity to describe their child's interest, participation, enjoyment, and/or difficulties in daily activities, family activities, and community activities. As part of the Family Report, parents complete an assessment of their child's skills that has a one-to-one correspondence with the goals assessed by the AEPS Test. The AEPS developers strongly encourage family participation in assessment to help identify the child's strengths and needs. AEPS users are also strongly encouraged to include the family's priorities for intervention, also solicited by the Family Report, in all intervention programming. Families also love the AEPS Child Progress Record, which provides a graphical view of a child's progress across all of the developmental domains and is a critical tool providers can use to support their collaboration with parents.
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Besides providing information regarding individual children's development, what utility does AEPS have for parents? For administrators?
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AEPS and AEPSi are useful at a variety of levels to parents and administrators. Families like AEPS because all of their priorities, observations, knowledge, and concerns are an integral part of the AEPS assessment through the Family Report. And because AEPS prioritizes meaningful, everyday skills for children, families' relationships and communication with their children typically greatly improve with AEPS interventions. AEPS families also love the AEPS Child Progress Record, which offers a "picture" of a child's progress and how close the child is to reaching his or her goals. In fact, because of its high sensitivity, AEPS can show families the progress their children are making at a finer level of detail than many other assessments can.
For administrators, using AEPS and AEPSi first and foremost gives them confidence that the child data they are submitting to the states and using to make programmatic decisions is accurate and valid. It's also hassle-free to generate; in addition to creating individual child progress reports, AEPSi enables administrators to easily create aggregate OSEP reports that can be used at local school or program, district, state, and federal levels. The one-click OSEP Report and eligibility cutoff score reports in particular make it easier for administrators to meet two critical challenges—accountability and eligibility—without sacrificing quality programming or wasting time and scarce funds on administering separate assessments. And AEPS, with its accurate test and proven-effective interventions, will better enable their programs to do what they exist to do—improve outcomes for children.
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