Kindergarten Assessments

Kindergarten students enter school with a wide variety of skills and at various stages of development. During your child’s first year of instruction at school, the teacher will use various assessment tools, tasks and observational checklists to determine your child’s strengths and needs in order to plan instruction.

Assessment Tools

Following are some of the assessment tools your child’s teacher will use: 

• NC ELI - The North Carolina Early Learning Inventory (NC ELI) is the updated kindergarten entry assessment formerly known as the NC KEA. NC ELI is an observation-based formative assessment that includes a set of developmental progressions across the five domains of learning and development: 
• Language and literacy development
• Cognition and general knowledge
• Approaches toward learning
• Physical well-being and motor development, and
• Social and emotional development). To learn more about the NC ELI, please check out this resource for families.
  
  
• NCEnsi - The North Carolina Early Numeracy Skill Indicator (NCEnsi, the Number Knowledge Test) is a progress monitoring tool that assesses math concepts diagnostic assessment. Examples include counting arrays, matching quantity to numeral, ordering number, ordinal position, decomposing quantities, and number recognition. NCEnsi measures should be administered to students within the strategic and intensive range as measured by the Number Knowledge Test.
  
  
• NC Diagnostic Formative Literacy Assessment - This assessment will provide the district, school and teacher with formative diagnostic assessments on students at the beginning, middle and end of the year. Areas assessed are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. These assessments are used as progress monitoring measures that will assist teachers in guiding strategic instruction for students as they learn to read.

If you have questions about any of these assessment tools, please contact your child’s Kindergarten teacher.