Screening tool for preschoolers

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Early Learning Observation Rating Scale

The purpose of the Early Learning Observation Rating Scale (ELORS) is to help teachers and parents gather and share information about young children with specific attention to characteristics that might be early signs of learning disabilities. The ELORS allows teachers and parents to reflect systematically on their concerns and helps them recognize if the child would benefit from additional support.

The ELORS is intended for use with four-year-old children in the year before kindergarten. The systematic and strategic observations will enable teachers and parents to gather information about children across developmental domains, determine levels of concern about children’s overall learning progress and their growth in specific areas of learning and behavior, and recognize children who might benefit from additional support for learning. The process and the results will inform communication and planning among parents, school personnel, and others.

There are three ELORS forms: Whole-Class, Teacher-Individual Child, and Parent-Individual Child.

The developmental domains covered by ELORS:

The Perceptual and Motor domain includes fine and gross motor skills, coordination, integrating motor skills and vision, sensory integration, visual memory, and tactile defensiveness.
The Self-Management domain includes self-regulation skills, delayed gratification, impulsivity, understanding consequences of actions, self-help skills, remembering routines, seeking help when appropriate, attentive behaviors, work habits, and response to learning situations.
The Social and Emotional domain includes social interactions, friendships and play, turn-taking, reciprocal play, self-expression and emotions, interpreting emotions of others, cooperation, and participating in group activities.
The Early Math domain includes quantity comparison, one-to-one correspondence, concept of attribute, recognition of simple patterns and sequences, spatial orientation, concept of time, counting, concept of number, number recognition, and number naming.
The Early Literacy domain includes emergent literacy skills related to awareness of letter sounds, syllables and rhymes, alphabet knowledge, interest in and knowledge of books and print, pre-writing skills, decoding, and word recognition.
The Receptive Language domain includes skills in hearing and understanding sounds, listening comprehension, recognizing and discriminating environmental sounds, completing sound patterns, shifting auditory attention, and auditory sequencing tasks.
The Expressive Language domain includes skills in talking and conversation including vocabulary, syntax, pragmatics, articulation, verbal memory, word retrieval, and spoken communication.

How to Use the ELORS

The ELORS Observation Forms

Interpreting the ELORS Results