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OSEP Reporting Tools: The Child Outcome Summary Form and ECO Ratings

(Note: Some knowledge of the OSEP reporting requirement and the work of the ECO center is assumed in the material discussed below – refer to the ECO website for more information.)

Many states are using the Child Outcome Summary Form (COSF), a tool developed by the Early Childhood Outcome Center (ECO), to combine diverse sources of child outcome data into a single metric used to respond to the annual OSEP reporting requirement. IGDIs, like other outcome measures can be used in this process.

ECO provided developers and publishers of curriculum-based outcome measures guidance on how to translate an instrument’s “native” scores to an equivalent ECO rating for use with the COSF and annual OSEP reporting. Embedded in this guidance was consideration of the requirements mandated by OSEP, for example, that the transformed scores reflect a comparison to typical performance and that scores can be compared across different instruments.

ECO ratings range from 1 to 7. The table for converting native instrument scores to ECO ratings is shown in Exhibit 1. The basic procedure uses the normal distribution as the common denominator. As seen in the left most column, each ECO rating is associated with a lower and higher bound z-score (or Standard Deviation score) and an area accounted for under the normal curve. This banding allows you to convert instrument scores to ECO ratings.

As seen, ECO ratings of 6 and 7 reflect typical performance just above and below -1 SD of the mean for children of similar chronological age. Ratings of 5 to 1 reflect increasingly lower levels of performance, also marked in z or SD score bands on the normal curve.

This guidance was used to produce tabled values of IGDI scores corresponding to the ECO rating scale.

Applied to IGDIs, lower boundary performance trajectories were computed to segment IGDI scores into their ECO rating equivalents (7 vs 6, etc.) at each month of age. In the case of the Early Communication Indicator (ECI), these trajectories corresponding to ECO ratings are illustrated in Exhibit 2.

The IGDI scores reported on a child’s COSF as evidence of performance are twofold: (1) The total rate per minute score for the IGDI at a month of age, and (2) its ECO rating equivalent (1 to 7).