Eric.ed.gov – How Much Does the Pre-K CLASS Relate to Children’s Readiness for School Skills? Early Childhood Literature Scan Brief

One widely used tool that captures the process quality of preschool classrooms, including interactions between teachers and children, is the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Preschool (Pre-K CLASS; Pianta et al. 2008). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded Mathematica to conduct a literature scan to search for recent studies analyzing how well widely used classroom quality measures–including the Pre-K CLASS–perform (see box at the end of the brief for more details about methods). This brief focuses on what is known about how the Pre-K CLASS relates to children’s outcomes in general, and whether its relationships with outcomes differs for key subgroups of children. The authors include outcomes that reveal a child’s readiness for school, categorized as language; literacy; math; and social-emotional, executive function, and physical skills (coordination of vision and movement).