Competency gradient for child-parent centers.

This report describes an implementation of the Rasch model during the longitudinal evaluation of a federally-funded early childhood preschool intervention program. An item bank is described for operationally defining a psychosocial construct called community life-skills competency, an expected teenage outcome of the preschool intervention. This analysis examined the position of teenage students on this scale structure, and investigated a pattern of cognitive operations necessary for students to pass community life-skills test items. Then this scale structure was correlated with nationally standardized reading and math achievement scores, teacher ratings, and school records to assess its validity as a measure of the community-related outcome goal for this intervention. The results show a functional relationship between years of early intervention and magnitude of effect on the life-skills competency variable.