What does it mean to be kindergarten ready? How do student-level factors, such as gender or birthdate, influence whether a student is prepared to be successful in a full-day program?
In this story, we look at data from the annual WaKIDS assessment within the context of individual student demographics. The observational assessment is completed by teachers during the first two months of the school year. Teachers score the abilities of each student on six dimensions of child development: social-emotional, physical, cognitive, language, literacy, and mathematics.
A safety pin with six beads was built for each of our 486 kindergartners who were assessed during the fall of 2017. Silver safety pins represent boys and gold pins represent girls. The six beads—one for each dimension of the assessment—appear in one of eight colors from the scoring scale.
The safety pins were organized for each school by the total number of purple (or pink, silver, or brown) beads from "most" ready (all six beads representing kindergarten skills) to least (no beads indicating kindergarten readiness). These were attached using a red map pin for students whose birthdates fell within six months of the first day of school, or white map pins for older students. Collections were placed on the display by highest percent population of low-income students in the upper left (Peter G. Schmidt Elementary) to the lowest percent in the bottom right (Black Lake Elementary).