DERS: The Developmental Environmental Rating Scale

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.

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.

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.

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.

The DERS brings developmental learning theory to bear on classroom observation and appraisal. Instruments such as the ECERS and the CLASS exist to measure classroom quality, but the look-for’s in these tools have not been shown to correlate with the skills most needed for human flourishing. Rather, they focus primarily on indicators associated with safety or dyadic interactions between teachers and students, and they are not aligned with desired outcomes such as executive functions, linguistic and cultural fluency, or emotional flexibility. 

DERS is explicitly framed by the theory and practice of developmental learning. In laying out key precepts that frame our definition of quality, the assumptions that govern the instrument are transparent, coherent, and grounded in research. The tool offers an unusual degree of specificity, capturing the detail of practice that supports human development through a focus on concrete and observable phenomena. Lastly, DERS aligns evidence-based attributes characterizing developmental education with outcomes such as curiosity, empathy, persistence, reason, and self-regulation. No other tool is equally grounded in research on human potential.

The DERS is packaged as an iPad app. Users score 60 items within the app during a 60-minute classroom observation window. Based on the scoring of individual items, a report is generated, including scores across five domains and a fully editable and customizable narrative. Users can view, edit, and email reports within the app and via a web portal. The web portal also allows users to download observation data in spreadsheet forms. Within the app itself, the Report Trends screen allows users to examine change over time, filtered by classroom, date, and domain.

Assessing classrooms for attributes that support human flourishing using the DERS will help teachers to develop these qualities, and students and communities will thrive. Well-designed measurement not only serves a means of holding ourselves accountable, but, when implemented effectively, provides a pathway toward improvement. Anecdotal reports from teachers who have completed DERS training suggests that the training process alone constitutes a powerful intervention, helping teachers identity concrete, actionable changes they can make in their learning environments and their interactions with children. Inter-rater reliability is consistently at 80% or better. Given a tool that directly describes and supports stronger, more child-centered, and personalized classrooms, early learning institutions and supervisors will better be able to assess, discuss and support the work of early childhood educators in a way that matters. As one user told us,“It gave us a simple way of evaluating important quality factors for our classrooms.” Ultimately, children and families enjoy the benefits of classrooms that truly support human flourishing.

Currently, we have 523 educators who have completed DERS training. By extension, we estimate that these 523 users across 115 schools are using DERS to improve the quality of learning environments for approximately 25,000 children.

In one year, our goal is to train another 300 or more DERS users, for a user base of over 800 educators impacting 40,000 children or more. We have recently moved to an asynchronous online training format to increase our capacity to train new users.

In five years, we plan to have over 2,500 DERS users serving over 125,000 children.

Our overarching goal is to catalyze the improvement of early childhood classrooms through scaling the DERS as a tool for formative and summative assessment. Moving into the growth phase of implementation requires a concerted advocacy effort aimed primarily toward state departments of early learning and institutions of higher education. Support from Solve will enable us to mount a strategic outreach effort focusing on state-level policy and decision-makers associated with Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS).

Our biggest challenge is scalability. In order to increase the impact of DERS, the tool needs to make inroads beyond the Montessori community. Currently, the vast majority of DERS users are practitioners in Montessori school settings. Because this is a fairly insular community, the word of mouth “buzz” around the tool has not yet extended to more traditional early childhood environments. The current composition of state QRIS frameworks also presents a barrier; more users would learn about and be incentivized to use the DERS if it was an option within the QRIS process. Once one state incorporates the DERS into QRIS in this way, it becomes much easier to persuade others to follow suit. Furthermore, we need a business plan that suits our ambitious growth trajectory, and the technological support to make implementation at scale feasible.

We plan to leverage our partnerships both within and beyond the Montessori community to market the tool to a broader audience. This includes presentations at conferences focused on early childhood education and development, joint research projects, and collaborative work with early education advocacy groups. These partnerships will enable us to build both the research base and the broad-based support needed to successfully lobby state-level policy and decision-makers to consider the DERS as a component of their Quality Rating and Improvement Systems. We have brought the DERS this far as a skilled team of educators and researchers, and are now seeking team members with expertise in brand development, sales and marketing, and data analytics to support this phase of exponential growth.

DERS is an Initiative of the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector (NCMPS), an independent non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC. NCMPS develops and disseminates research-based solutions to pressing problems of practice, supports leaders in delivering effective Montessori programming, and cultivates a robust network of practitioners, parents, and policymakers who share a commitment to child-centered developmental education—and the life-changing transformations that result.

Three full-time employees, one part-time employee.

The members of the DERS team bring expertise in developmental education together with in-depth knowledge of the most pressing needs and issues in early childhood education. Our team members include veteran early childhood educators, researchers, and experienced school leaders. Montessori is a time-tested, research-based, and coherent approach to early childhood education, rooted in the science of child development. As the only nonprofit organization devoted to serving public Montessori programs in the United States, we are uniquely positioned to bring the most transformative elements of Montessori pedagogy to bear on the field of early learning in the United States and beyond. We bridge the worlds of progressive, child-centered pedagogy and mainstream American public education. As a research-based solution provider, we are in touch with the needs of practitioners in the field, and we leverage the latest research to support educators in improving their practice. Our contribution to the field of early childhood assessment constitutes a coherent theory of action linking classroom-level inputs to wide-scope developmental outcomes for children.

Trust for Learning, the Harold Simmons Foundation, and Wend Ventures have all provided financial support for the development of the solution.

Through the Montessori Foundation, we have worked with schools that have piloted the work. 

Researchers funded by the American Institutes for Research are using the DERS in a large research project looking at Montessori outcomes. Their usage of the instrument, and the subsequent technical feedback received, will help us further improve and refine DERS.

NCMPS relies on a fee for service model of social enterprise. We provide a set of services aimed at strengthening the practice of teachers, pedagogical coaches, and school leaders in developmentally oriented, personalized learning environments. Workshops, training, and coaching, are supported by a set of tools designed to guide implementation of best public practice in these environments. The majority of NCMPS time and talent is devoted to the design and delivery of these services and products, the majority of which are delivered for a fee to schools through a set of packages customized for start-up or sustaining support.

Our path to financial sustainability will come through scaling the product through both US and international markets. To date, DERS has made substantial inroads into the US Montessori sector. We further believe that a carefully developed marketing plan, aligned with thoughtful partners, will allow us to vastly increase the number of schools using this tool. 

In addition, philanthropic partners have supported the work of NCMPS staff necessary for a) the development of the app, b) the creation of a team to market and sell the app, and c) staff members involved in training users on how to use the app and interpret outcomes.

The Solve prize would provide the DERS team with the resources necessary to develop a marketing and business plan to ensure to scalability and sustainability of the tool and thus maximize its impact on early childhood education. We are most interested, however, in the potential to tap into the wealth of expertise and experience within the Solve and MIT networks. Given the central role of technology in our solution, we are eager to make connections with partners that can help us optimize both our app and our data analytics for the most powerful user experience. Though our team brings tremendous expertise in education and child development, we would benefit immensely from connection with individuals and organizations with experience in the marketing and sale of virtual products like the DERS.

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Our ideal partnerships center around our dual goals of advocacy and scalability. We would like to partner with early childhood education and development research entities, like the National Institute for Early Childhood Education Research and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina, to build the research base for DERS in order to increase efficacy of our advocacy efforts. Similarly, we seek partnerships with organizations, like the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Head Start Association, that advocate for quality early learning experiences. To address the challenges associated with scalability, we are looking for partners with expertise in app design, data aggregation, and sales and marketing of virtual products.

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