Research and Development of Exploring Solutions Assessments for Children between Birth and Age Eight. Technical Report #5.

This report describes research and development activities concerned with developing a set of tools for planning interventions for individual children, birth to age 8. It is part of a 5-year project to develop a comprehensive system of assessment within a decision-making framework for programs serving children with and without disabilities, birth to age 8. The set of tools, Exploring Solutions Assessment, is described including program features, activity/curriculum-based, and ecobehavioral assessments. Compared to measures of child progress, these measures of potential solutions focus on a child's strengths and weaknesses in the curriculum to identify skills mastered and skills to be taught, child/caregiver behaviors most likely to enable the learning of these skills, and elements of the child's learning environment most responsible for teaching these skills and supporting their generalization. Appendices include a list of program features, a teacher survey, activity-based assessment scripts, and ecobehavioral assessment instrument taxonomies. (Contains 102 references.) (DB)