Completing the Development of the Electronic Test of Early Numeracy (e-TEN)

The project continues and completes the development and refinement of an electronic Test of Early Numeracy (e-TEN) in English and Spanish, focused on number and operations for young learners. The assessment incorporates a learning trajectory approach that describes students' development of the understanding of numbers. The electronic assessment allows for the test to adapt to students' responses and incorporate games increasing children's engagement with the tasks. These features take advantage of the electronic format. The achievement test is designed to be efficient, user-friendly, affordable, and accessible for a variety of learning environments and a broad age range of students (3 to 8 years old). The goal of the assessment design is to create a measure that is more accurate, more accessible to a wider range of children, and easier to administer than existing measures. The proposed activities also include establishing 10 separate but equated computer adaptive tests to produce a complete commonly scaled construct for ages 3-8, capturing change in numeracy ability across 10 six-month intervals. These efforts will be validated in both English and Spanish with national norms.

The e-TEN assesses informal and formal knowledge of number and operations in domains including verbal counting, numbering, numerical relationships, as well as mental addition and subtraction. The items are designed using domain-based learning trajectories that describe students' development of understanding of the numerical topics. The test is designed with some key characteristics. It is semi-adaptive over six-month age spans. It has an electronic format that allows for uniform implementation and an efficient, user-friendly administration. The test is accessible to Spanish speakers using an inclusive assessment model across a number of platforms. The game-based aspect increases children's engagement and presents more meaningful tasks. The user-friendly aspect includes simplifying the assessment process compared to other tests of numeracy in early childhood. The first phase of the development tests a preliminary version of the e-TEN to test its functionality and feasibility. These later phases norm the items, and examines its reliability and validity characteristics. Reliability is assessed using Item Response Theory methods and test-retest reliability measures. Validity examines criterion-prediction validity and other aspects of construct validity. The final phase of the work includes creating a Spanish version of the test including collecting data from bilingual children using both versions of the e-TEN numeracy measure.