The Five P's System is an early childhood assessment, developed at VCLC, measuring preschool children's development based on observation of his/her performance of relevant tasks. It structures and organizes data received so that teacher and parent judgments serve to assist in identifying social, learning, language and behavioral skills. Each team targets instructional objectives that are functional, and can be achieved through interventions in a variety of natural settings.

The Five P's is for children functioning between the ages of six and 59 months, for whom standardized testing is not adequate. The child's two primary care givers, parent and teacher, complete the assessment. Parents and teachers separately rate the child on observed behaviors in the two settings most familiar to the child: home and school. Ratings include 458 items resulting in yes, sometimes, and no responses, which reflect parent and teacher judgments of the specific behaviors. Upon completion of ratings the data is combined to produce the Share and Compare Report Ð a report to set instructional goals and priorities.

A research team (Judith S. Bloch, ACSW, VCLC; John Hicks, Ed.D. Fordham University; and Janice Friedman, MA, VCLC) was initiated in 1981 to design and implement studies to evaluate the reliability and validity of The Five P's. These studies proved that this instrument is both reliable and valid, and provides a systematic method to observe, rate, record, and compare the child's behavior in multiple settings.

The Normalization Study continues to collect teachers and parents' ratings of a national sample of typically developing children. This data is used to develop sets of norms needed to evaluate the scales at different age levels. Index scores and percentile scores can be calculated against a national sample. The Five P's was favorably reviewed by The Buros Institute of Mental Measurements in The Tenth Mental Measurements Year book (1989) and the The Thirteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook (1998). For further info contact Five Ps Research.