Establishing Technically Adequate Measures of Progress in Early Numeracy

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of three early numeracy measures to monitor the mathematics progress of students across time. One hundred and seven kindergarten and Grade 1 students were administered quantity discrimination, number identification, and missing-number measures once each month for 7 months. Alternate form reliability was adequate for instructional decision making, whereas criterion validity coefficients comparing the early numeracy measures to teacher judgment of student proficiency in mathematics and students’ performance on a district-administered standardized test were lower than those observed in previous research. We used hierarchical linear modeling at each grade level to examine the ability of the three measures to model growth across time. All measures produced growth rates that were significant across time, for each grade level, with linear growth observed for the Number Identification measure only.