Measuring child engagement in inclusive early childhood settings: implications for practice

This paper examines how the engagement of children with disabilities is measured in inclusive early childhood settings and to determine the characteristics needed to ensure that such measures would be useful to practitioners. Child engagement can be used as a child outcome measure, a measure of program quality and a guide for programming decisions. Measures of engagement cited in the literature are examined and features of those measures are described. Based on the gaps identified in the existing measures, the characteristics of a measure of engagement with the potential to be useful to practitioners as opposed to researchers are identified in relation to (i) practicality, (ii) sensitivity to the participation of children with disabilities, including severe disabilities, and (iii) ability to measure the degree of participation across children and across activity types.