Submission Type: Practice-BasedÂ
Final Rating: Promising Practice
Date Submitted: Fall 2022
Focus Area: Healthy Environments and Relationships
Focus Population: Teachers, Parents, Family Child Care Providers
Contact Information:
Tammy Kwan
CEOÂ
(646) 820-8635
Cognitive ToyBox
150 Court St Floor 2, Brooklyn, New York 11201
Goals and Outcomes:
For this submission, we aim to support family child care providers and families with better understanding around school readiness through our game-based assessment platform. Cognitive ToyBox helps school administrators, teachers, child care providers, parents and other family members make sure that every child is ready to start school and succeed in life. We do this by making ongoing assessment easy and actionable for early childhood educators. Well-planned and effective assessments inform teaching and program improvement, contributing to better outcomes for children (Snow & Van Hemel, 2008). Currently, the primary method of obtaining information about student progress in early childhood education programs is through teacher-conducted observation-based assessment and evaluation against developmental guides. However, an observation-only assessment approach poses limitations in reliability, validity, and usability. Cognitive ToyBox provides teachers and child care providers with a hybrid game-based and observation-based assessment system. This approach is designed to support teachers and child care providers in spending less time on assessment, while gathering reliable and valid data on an ongoing basis. Cognitive ToyBox is designed to help programs shift from assessment for compliance to assessment for continuous program improvement. Importantly, Cognitive ToyBox also makes assessment accessible for programs, including family child care providers, that traditionally have not been able to incorporate assessment, given its ease of implementation. The aim of Cognitive ToyBox is to give teachers and child care providers more individualized support for children, enabling them to thrive.
One strength of Cognitive ToyBox is our experience working with many different types of early childhood programs, including home-based child care, community-based childcare programs, Early Head Start and Head Start programs, and public PreK, TK, and K programs. With this submission, we aim to support family child care providers in OK who are interested in incorporating assessment into their program, but have traditionally not been able to find the right tool to do so. Moreover, with the assessment tool, we aim to strengthen collaboration between parents and family child care providers in supporting school readiness for each child.
Brief Summary:
Cognitive ToyBox works with school and center-based early childhood education settings, including Oklahoma City Public Schools, on early childhood assessment. With this submission, we are proposing to expand our work to family child care providers (and the families they support) in Oklahoma. Our tools are currently utilized by family child care providers in Texas and Pennsylvania and research has shown that providers can experience a high degree of success in integrating and using our tool (Kwan, 2021). The providers’ adoption of Cognitive ToyBox in these two states has enabled them to improve their QRIS rating, while at the same time provide more information to parents and caregivers about how to support their children with regards to school readiness. Given the positive experience that Oklahoma City Public Schools administrators, teachers and families have had with the product, we are keen to add Oklahoma as the third state to expand our family child care provider offering. We would be eager to work with Oklahoma’s existing infrastructure around Shared Services and their Childcare Resource and Referral services to ensure a smooth roll-out and implementation to their providers.
Citation: Kwan, T. (2021). Supporting family child care providers and networks with Cognitive ToyBox. New York, NY: Author.