Submitted
Early Childhood Development

DERS: The Developmental Environmental Rating Scale

Team Leader
Katie Brown
Solution overview
Our Solution
DERS: The Developmental Environmental Rating Scale
Tagline
Measuring what matters for optimal child development in early learning environments
Pitch us on your solution

Existing measures of quality for early childhood classrooms don’t adequately prioritize the most important developmental outcomes for children, including executive functions, deep literacy, and social-emotional skills. Nor do they identify indicators of quality that match these outcomes. The DERS is an iPad-based classroom observation tool designed to provide a multidimensional classroom assessment based on three interconnected dimensions of quality: adult behavior,  child behavior, and environmental attributes.

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What is the problem you are solving?

According to the World Bank, 184 million children around the world are currently enrolled in pre-primary education, but the quality of these programs varies widely, even in affluent countries like the United States. A recent review of public pre-K programs in 40 large American cities found that only 13 of them met minimum quality benchmarks. Access to high-quality preschool has been shown to be one of the most effective interventions to break the cycle of poverty and improve life outcomes for vulnerable children and families. Effective preschool programs provide essential cognitive, social, and emotional skills, yet children from low-income families are most likely to start elementary school behind as a result of lack of access to quality early learning environments. Furthermore, the field lacks a good way to drive preschool classroom quality through leading edge assessment system. Existing instruments focus primarily on simplistic safety measures or surface-level interactions between teachers and students. Such instruments fail to capture the complexity of learning environments designed to foster what matters most for future success: executive functions, deep literacy, and social-emotional skills. Perhaps most important, these instruments don’t provide a road map by which a teacher can directly improve the learning environment for children.

Who are you serving?

The DERS is ultimately designed to benefit young children in early learning environments around the world. We heard over and over from teachers in developmental classrooms that the instruments being used to evaluate their classrooms did not capture the essence of their work. To address this need, we created the DERS, which was inspired by Montessori and informed by a comprehensive review of the literature on early childhood education and human development. It was then vetted and refined through repeat field testing, trial and iterations. DERS is based on a distinctive view of learning that re-frames the process of instruction to de-emphasize both teacher-centered content transmission and dyadic interactions between teachers and students. Rather, within this frame, the child moves to the center of a triadic enterprise, constructing—as opposed to receiving—understanding through structured, spontaneous interactions with adults and the environment. Widespread use of the DERS will enable thousands of early childhood learning environments to undertake significant and sustainable continuous improvement efforts. Because the DERS makes the complexity of developmental learning environments both accessible and actionable, the tool is much more than an assessment instrument. Its specificity and coherence make it a guide to developmental practice for practitioners.

What is your solution?

The result of four years of classroom-based research and review of the literature on human development, the Developmental Environmental Rating Scale (DERS) is an iPad-based tool designed to respond to the existing methods for measuring the quality of learning environments that are misaligned with the overarching goal of human flourishing. These include self-regulation, persistence, creativity, collaboration, and joy. The purpose of the DERS is to provide a multidimensional view of what actually goes on inside early learning classrooms directed toward supporting optimal human development. DERS aligns environmental design and implementation with desired outcomes related to executive function, linguistic and cultural fluency, and social-emotional learning. The 60 items comprising the DERS are organized across three observational categories—children, adults, and the environment—and scored using an iPad app during a one-hour classroom observation. The app generates a report that includes scores for the classroom across five domains as well as a fully customizable narrative. Users can use this report to coach teachers toward continuous improvement and can track progress over time.

Since the app’s release in early 2017, over 500 users have become trained to use the tool and have completed over 700 observations in early childhood classrooms. Many of these users, who are members of a network of early adopters, are using the instrument alongside the Minnesota Executive Function Scale (Carlson & Zelazo, 2014) as part of the process of investigating the DERS’ capacity to predict student performance on measures of EFs. The DERS does not measure these child-level outcomes directly. Rather, it reflects the manner in which the classroom environment promotes the development of these outcomes for children.

Because the DERS draws attention to 60 highly specific environmental attributes, it has already been shown to catalyze meaningful improvement in classroom quality.  By scaling its use to early childhood programs beyond the early adopters’ network, it has the potential to influence widespread improvement through concrete, actionable assessment and reporting.

Select only the most relevant.
  • Prepare children for primary school through exploration and early literacy skills
Where is your solution team headquartered?
Washington D.C., DC, USA
Our solution's stage of development:
  • Growth
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Solution Team:
Katie Brown
Katie Brown
Director of Professional Learning