A Critical Gap in Early Childhood Policies: Children’s Meaning Making

Developmental science demonstrates that younger children (ages 4 to 8) are capable of making meaning of their contexts and the self. Yet, younger children’s meaning making is largely absent from intervention and implementation research on early childhood policies. This absence is notable given the rise in investment in early childhood policies and the need to understand how to maximize and sustain their impacts. In the current study, we consider how better measurement of children’s meaning making of a current policy-related intervention could provide an important and new tool to inform the design, structure, and content of early childhood policies We describe the following three major advances in psychological science and technology that make it the opportune time to consider measuring younger children’s meaning making: (a) general recognition that younger children can make about their environmental contexts and the self, (b) evidence on the validity of assessment paradigms (i.e., the Berkeley Puppet Interview) to assess younger children’s meaning making, and (c) emerging evidence that technological advances can support the measurement of complex processes at scale. We then describe our process for developing a novel measurement tool, which pairs a tablet-based assessment paradigm (the Childhood Assessment Tool–Electronic (CHAT-E)) with a newly developed content-specific scale, to study how kindergarten students make meaning of college savings accounts within an intervention/ implementation study. We provide lessons learned and implications for research conducted at the intersection of psychology, implementation science, and child policy.