Screening technique

The Leuven Scales have been developed to assess well-being and involvement. They are available in two variants, depending on their purpose and the procedure following it.

What is screening?

The screening technique is used by the practitioner to assess well-being and involvement of all individual children periodically (based on observations over a period of a few weeks) and to draw portraits of individual children which lead to the necessary interventions to raise the levels of well‐being and/or involvement. It is the ‘spinal cord’ in the Process-Oriented Child Monitoring System (POMS) and MyProfile.

Purpose

The screening technique is most powerful because it brings practitioners closer to each of the children. It can identify barriers to learning and enables practitioners to tailor the practice to the needs and profiles of every child in the group (optimizing practice in general and interventions on individual level).

Users

Practitioners

Main advantages

• Screening exploits the wealth of information or images that the practitioners have stored about each of the children over a period of two or three weeks which are used to see how they experienced the provided context.
• The group screening is very economic: it starts from two variables—well‐being and involvement—and after completion produces a shortlist of children who need more attention. From there, extra observations and collection of information are undertaken for those who are in the red zone (with at least one score below 3) or in the amber zone (with at least one score at level 3).
• The nature of the two process variables guarantees that both the process of socio‐emotional development and the process of development of cognition and competences are covered.
• Typical features of the process variables are that they signal potential problems at the earliest stage and provide feedback about the impact of interventions.
• The identification of children who do not thrive is the main entrance. In contrast, a product‐oriented approach focuses on achievement and would label children who are not meeting the norm level for the age group as “in need.” In the process‐oriented approach, children who are truly engaging in activities in the area for which they are not meeting the norm will not appear on the shortlist of children needing remediation.

Downloads

  • Lenaerts, F., Braeye, S., Nguyen, T.L.H., Dang, T.A., & Vromant, N. (2017). Supporting Teachers in Vietnam to Monitor Preschool Children’s Wellbeing and Involvement in Preschool Classrooms, in: International Journal of Early Childhood, 49 (2), 245-262. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-017-0188-2