15 Checklists and Rating Scales

When an educator wants to look at a child’s overall development, checklists can be a very useful tool to determine the presence or absence of a particular skill, milestone or behavior. Educators observe children during different times of the day and check-off the skills and behaviours as they are observed.

Checklists are an efficient and practical way to collect information about a child’s development. Checklists are based on “developmental norms” as determined by developmental theorists. With each age range, there are certain expectations and skills that a child should be able to achieve. Checklists are designed to track a child’s competencies in all the developmental domains including physical, cognitive, language, social and emotional. With a checklist, educators can easily identify whether skills have been mastered or not. Educators can create their own checklists based on certain skill sets, or they can download a formal developmental milestone checklist from a reputable source to look at a child’s full range of development. Checklists can be used to track a large group of children or an individual child.

Collecting your data

Whether you design your own checklist or download one, use it regularly to collect data. The checklist can be utilized in two ways:

1. You can observe a child on a specific day while they are engaged in an activity (either child-directed or educator-directed). As you observe, you will check off the skills or milestones that the child can do on that day, at that moment.
2. You can also review data from other observations (e.g. running records, anecdotal records, work samples) that you collected, and add any other skills or milestones that were mastered during those previous observations.

*Note: It is vital that you note the dates that you observed the skills being mastered.

Organizing your Data

Schedule a day and time to regularly review your observation data. Data collected from other observations (mastered milestones and developing skill sets) can be added to the checklist so you can clearly see a child’s progress over time. You may use colored pens to track all the different dates that milestones were achieved. As you review the checklist, what can you interpret from this data? Does the child demonstrate strengths in any of the developmental domains or areas of learning? Which milestones and skills need further support? As you consider those questions, reflect on a plan of action that you might use to further support that child’s development. How can you provide opportunities for the child to gain more practice? What adjustments need to be made to make the activity more challenging? What extensions can be added to continue the learning pattern?

Make a note of any areas about which you are uncertain because of difficulty in interpreting the criteria or because the behaviour is just emerging. If more than 80% of the items are checked, you may find that the child’s behaviour has developed beyond the scope of your checklist. If so, you should consider using a more advanced checklist. This is important because if we check off all items on a checklist, while that tells us what the child is able to do and confirms that the child has met milestones, it doesn’t leave any room for growth. The absence of a behaviour doesn’t necessarily indicate that the child is incapable of performing the behaviour, so when certain skills are not demonstrated, set up experiences that will provide children with the opportunity to demonstrate those skills and then document the results.

Advantages

Here are some advantages of checklists:

1. Ideal for tracking a child’s progress over time
2. Different observers (the educator, assistant or a support team) can check off skills that they observe the child doing
3. Checklists can be created to measure specific areas of development, or a subset of developmental skills
4. Checklists can be used to observe a group of children or an individual child
5. Checklists are quick and easy to use, and no training is required
6. Checklists can be used in conjunction with other observations
7. Checklists highlight the developmental strengths a child has mastered, as well as those skills that need further support
8. Developmental Milestone Checklists are readily available on-line through various agencies
9. Data can help plan curriculum activities

Disadvantages

The following are some drawbacks to using checklists:

1. Checklists do not provide rich details or context like anecdotal notes or running records
2. There is no clear sequence of events to regarding certain actions or behaviors
3. Checklists focus on developmental norms and typical development with no regard for environment, family influences, cultural influences and individual development
4. Educators tend to focus on the skills and milestones that haven’t been mastered, focusing on the deficits rather than highlighting the strengths. This can make the child and parents feel as if they have failed or add unnecessary stress
5. Checklists must be updated regularly using other observation methods

Here’s are some examples of a checklist that focuses on a child’s movement skills.

Perceptual Movement

Gross Motor Movement

Fine Motor Movement

Rating Scales

Rating scales are very similar to checklists in that they outline what we are looking for ahead of time, however with rating scales, rather than identify whether skills are present or absent, educators are presented with a scale of options that provides more flexibility to communicate the degree to which a skill has been demonstrated or not. For example, rather than the “Can do” and “needs support” shown in the checklist example above, a rating scale for the same skills might have a score of 1 to 5, so if educators see some presence of a skill but it hasn’t been quite mastered yet, they might rate it at a 4. This more detailed information can help educators determine which children might need a little more support and who might be ready to be challenged further.

While many of the rating scales that you may be using as an educator will focus on children’s development, another commonly used rating scale in early learning programs is the Environment Rating Scale, so we will look at that next, both to get a better idea of how rating scales in general are used, but also to introduce the idea of documenting our observations of the environment children spend their time in.