• Ready or not
    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.
     
     
    About the display
    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. 
     
    TS Gold Scale showing eight levels by colour
     
    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).
  • Explore further
    We began using the WaKIDS assessment in 2015 with four of our schools. In 2016, all six schools received funding for full-day kindergarten and used this assessment. You can review historical data on the OSPI web site.
     
    Our offline display provides student-level information. You can download the charts posted on our board, or, you can explore aggregate information here. Use the pop-out button in the lower righthand corner to view this workbook full size.

     
    Ethics statement
    All data were collected by Tumwater School District staff on December 21, 2017. Assessment data were provided by OSPI through a secure file transfer. Student demographic data were retrieved from Homeroom, one of our student information systems. Microsoft Excel was used to match data from the two sets. Excel was also used to produce the charts that appear in booklets below the display, as well as the tables shown above. To protect student privacy, student identification numbers were altered.