Early Learning Guidelines/Early Childhood Standards

Good Start, Grow Smart: The State of the States Early Learning Guidelines is available through The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, National Child Care Information Center.

Where We Stand on Early Learning Standards (PDF: 62kb) outlines NAEYC's position on defining the desired outcomes and content of young children's education.

Child Outcome Standards in Pre-K Programs: What Are Standards; What Is Needed To Make Them Work? (PDF: 1,196kb) by R. Shore, E. Bodrova and D. Leong in NIEER's Preschool Policy Matters (March 2004) provides an overview of how the standards movement is being extended to preschool programs; describes child outcomes standards in relation to other types of standards and quality indicators; describes nine keys to effective standards; and provides recommendations for policy makers and educators.

Head Start Program Performance Measures, available through The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, National Child Care Information Center, are designed to support continuous program improvement efforts of individual programs. The framework, depicted by a pyramid, includes measures for management systems, program services, and family and child outcomes, and can guide the development of plans for data collection to provide program staff with important information on program strengths and weaknesses.

Head Start: Further Development Could Allow Results of New Test To Be Used for Decision Making, (May 2005) (PDF: 958kb) is the GAO report that examines the quality of the information garnered from the National Reporting System (NRS), as well as how the Head Start Bureau has responded to concerns raised by grantees and experts in the field. Issues raised by the authors include: the validity and reliability of the assessment, the narrow scope of Head Start requirements tested, a lack of definition as to how the results will be used for program improvement, and the feasibility of conducting the assessment with all children enrolled in Head Start.

Selected State Early Learning Guidelines on the Web is hosted by The National Child Care Information Center (NCCIC) and includes a collection of links to current state learning standards for infants, toddlers, and preschool children.

The State Standards Database, created by Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) for the National Institute of Early Education Research (NIEER), illustrates the specific knowledge and skills identified by states as important for prekindergarten education. Content from states' standards documents are organized within a hierarchical structure of domains, standards, and benchmarks which can be compared across states.

Inside the Content: The Breadth and Depth of Early Learning Standards, (PDF: 1,905kb) authored by C. Scott-Little, S. L. Kagan, V.S. Frelow (March 2005) is a summary of Early Learning Standards collected from 36 states that were analyzed to determine to what extent they addressed various dimensions, (i.e., cognition and general knowledge, language and communication, social emotional development, and approaches to learning) and indicators of child development and early learning. Findings indicate that standards vary greatly across states, as does the degree to which these standards address important elements of learning and development.