Developing Decision-Making Tools through Partnerships

In this article, Amanda Williford, Jason Downer, Kate Miller-Bains, Jenna Conway, and Lisa Howard tell us how a university research center, an early education advocacy group, and a state department of education joined forces in a research-practice partnership to develop and implement a more comprehensive assessment of young Virginia children's readiness for kindergarten. The Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program, or VKRP, as the assessment they built is called, added measures of math, self-regulation, and social skills to complement Virginia's existing statewide assessment of prekindergarten children's literacy. The aim was not only to better assess children's readiness to enter school, but also to guide teachers' instructional practice and help the state target support. The partnership produced many benefits: for policy makers, a statewide snapshot of children's readiness; for researchers, on-the-ground feedback from teachers; and for the education department, joint review and interpretation of data patterns to aid decision-making. But at times, the fast pace of statewide implementation affected the university partners' ability to pursue their research aims, at least in the short term, highlighting a recurring theme of this issue-the challenges of balancing researchers' and partners' needs.