Background
In spring 2025, brightwheel partnered with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) to independently evaluate the psychometric properties, specifically, the validity and reliability, of the Experience Assessment.
The Experience Assessment is an observational tool grounded in the Experience Developmental Continuum of Skills, a framework that outlines measurable developmental benchmarks observable during natural play and classroom routines. It guides educators in documenting children’s growth across eight domains of learning:
1. Social & Emotional Development
2. Approaches to Learning
3. Physical Development
4. Language & Literacy Development
5. Science
6. Mathematics
7. Social Studies
8. Creative Arts
These domains encompass 36 core skills subdivided into 73 sub-skills, each rated on a continuum from Benchmark 1 (infant) to Benchmark 8 (primary grades). Educators assess children’s developmental progress on a rolling basis within three-month windows using the brightwheel app.
The first phase of the evaluation included an early childhood expert review of the assessment’s content. The second phase included data collection with 593 children (ages 0–5) and 79 educators from 10 early learning centers across eight U.S. states, offering a geographically diverse sample representing different instructional settings.
Validity and reliability were evaluated based on the assessment’s content, score distributions, internal consistency indicators, subgroup comparisons, and item-total correlations. For a more in-depth look at results, view the full technical report: Psychometric Evaluation of brightwheel’s Experience Assessment.
Results
Overall, the assessment demonstrated strong validity and reliability, with consistent evidence across psychometric indicators and curriculum product lines providing initial support for the assessment as a tool for measuring early childhood development.
Experience Assessment demonstrates strong validity
The Experience Assessment demonstrated strong validity, supported by key indicators:
- Comprehensive and theoretically sound content: Based on expert review, the assessment displayed comprehensive domain coverage, robust inclusion of key developmental metrics, nuance and depth, strong theoretical grounding and alignment with Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework (ELOF). These findings suggest that the assessment covers all the relevant aspects of the concepts it was designed to measure.
- Developmentally appropriate score progression: Scores increased consistently with children’s age across all domains, indicating that the tool captures natural developmental progression. This pattern held true across the full sample and within each curriculum group (baby, toddler, preschool). When data were disaggregated by age groups, older groups had higher scores than younger groups within each domain, further supporting the assessment’s accuracy in reflecting typical child development.
Together, these findings support that the Experience Assessment validly measures early childhood development across a comprehensive set of domains.
Experience Assessment demonstrates excellent reliability
The assessment also demonstrated excellent reliability through multiple measures:
- Internal consistency: All eight domains showed excellent internal consistency, as measured by Cronbach’s alpha, with values above 0.90, well above the commonly accepted threshold for reliability.
Domain Cronbach’s Alpha Approaches to Learning .93 Creative Arts .97 Language & Literacy .98 Mathematics .98 Physical Development .96 Science .96 Social Studies .96 Social & Emotional Development .98
These high values indicate that sub-skills within each domain are consistently measuring the same underlying construct.
- Domain integrity: Every sub-skill contributed meaningfully to its domain, with item-level analyses confirming that each component meaningfully contributed to the measurement of the broader skill area it represents.
- Cross-program consistency: Reliability held across programs using the Experience Curriculum and those using other curricula, indicating that the tool performs well across diverse instructional settings. This finding suggests the assessment is flexible enough to be considered for implementation in different educational environments.
Conclusion
The Experience Assessment met or exceeded established psychometric standards in both validity and reliability. The tool consistently reflects developmental progress and yields reliable results across domains, age groups, and curricular contexts.
These findings provide initial support for the Experience Assessment as an instrument for early childhood educators seeking to measure children's growth through authentic, play-based observation.
