Walking through a tidy preschool center to a small conference room, the center’s administrator walked us through a multitude of charts that she used to understand children’s progress. Despite all the data, she shared her perspective on what she felt was a barrier to ensuring that children learn and become ready for kindergarten: “You only get better outcomes if you get better instruction. So if you're not measuring instruction, you're not measuring the thing that actually helps the children improve.”

This sentiment is just one example of the frustration in early childhood education around the disconnect between measurement and outcomes. Educators often grapple with fragmented information and disparate data, hindering their ability to effectively assess child development, adapt instructional lessons for individualized child needs, provide tailored support, and equip families with the ability to supplement their child’s development at home.

To address this critical need, Renaissance Learning, supported by the Gates Foundation—Early Learning, partnered with Optimistic Design and Trackosaurus on a design research project to explore how a data integration platform could enhance the experiences of teachers and administrators, especially those serving children from historically marginalized backgrounds.

Design Research Approach
 

Taking a human-centered design approach, we focused on first understanding the current state of pre-K assessments, curricula, and data use through onsite qualitative research, interviewing and observing teachers and administrators from preschool centers in various regions in the U.S. We followed this onsite research with co-design sessions with teachers and administrators, project stakeholders, as well as experts who advised Optimistic Design throughout the project. Finally we synthesized our findings into clear recommendations and design principles that can guide the development of a data integration platform.

Our work was grounded in the targeted universalism framework, an approach that sets a universal goal for everyone, followed by targeted strategies to achieve those goals, particularly focusing on marginalized groups. In our case, the universal goal is equitable assessments and improved outcomes for all children, with targeted strategies focusing on children from Black, Latine, multilingual, and low-income backgrounds. We centered our research and design efforts on priority children from these groups, and the educators who serve them. 

“Little scraps of paper”

We visited centers in four different states: Minnesota, Ohio, California, and Washington, interviewing 22 teachers, administrators, and coaches. Teachers shared how they track, document, and share childrens’ progress, as well as the types of systems they use for doing so. These firsthand conversations uncovered key pain points faced by those who use assessment tools every day. 

• Teachers juggle a wide range of responsibilities, limiting the time they can dedicate to instructional planning and individual child support. Documentation is manual and time-consuming; oftentimes, important notes are captured in ‘little scraps of paper’ and other analog media. 
   
• Administrators need to optimize how data is utilized to make decisions about the program in order to better support instructional planning. Navigating the responsibilities of connecting curriculum to assessments to state standards is not always clear. Often, the easiest path is to use boxed curricula that might not fully serve a center’s needs. 
   
• Teachers and administrators want to leverage caregivers as collaborators in their child’s learning. Parents and caregivers sometimes feel reluctant to engage, particularly if they struggle with language or had traumatic school experiences themselves. 
   
• Programs face increasing pressure to meet funder requirements. Reporting to a variety of funders is a major pain point for administrators, with different disaggregation needs, as well as shifting requirements. 

Co-design with educators
 

Armed with insights from our onsite interviews, we held co-design workshops with Renaissance Learning, our expert advisers, and educators: teachers and administrators. Using “how might we” prompts—a method often used in the human-centered design process—the Optimistic Design team led workshops in which participants generated feature ideas for what an ideal platform would include, with areas of exploration focused on AI. The “how might we” prompts included: 
 

• How might we… inform a teacher’s instructional planning when there are many kids with different needs?
   
• How might we… handle different demographic data requests from funders?
   
• How might we… support a strengths-based understanding of child progress to share with caregivers?
   
• How might we… adapt processes if/when state or local reporting requirements change?

The workshops not only served as a creative form of ideation but also acted as an empowering experience for teacher and administrator participants. One teacher noted, “I’ve actually been really afraid of AI, but this has helped me see the different opportunities there are to use it and how it could actually help in the classroom.”