Head Start

Using ASQ to improve school readiness.

ASQ® supports Head Start’s primary goals: enhancing the social and cognitive development of children and engaging parents in their children’s learning. Whether your program is center-based, home-based, or a combination program, ASQ can help you deliver effective child development services that strengthen families and improve school readiness.

With ASQ, your Head Start program will meet its rigorous requirements.

Compliance with the Head Start Program Performance Standards. The ASQ system helps your program meet every requirement established by the Head Start Program Performance Standards, such as providing culturally sensitive, age-appropriate developmental and behavioral screening; actively locating children with disabilities; building collaborative partnerships with families; and providing parent involvement and education activities.

Review the Head Start Program Performance Standards.

Family education. ASQ’s benefits to parents last long after the screening is over: ASQ is the perfect way to educate parents about child development and keep them informed about their own child’s progress. The questionnaires reveal a child’s strengths as well as areas that need work, and they ask parents age-appropriate questions linked to specific milestones, making it easy for parents to learn about and encourage their child’s development. ASQ also includes learning activities that teach parents fun and easy ways to help their child make progress in key developmental areas.

Developmental and social-emotional screening within 45 days of enrollment. ASQ®-3 allows you to screen any child, anytime. Expanded administration windows make it easy to screen a child from 1–66 months without any gaps between the questionnaire age intervals, so you’ll always be able to screen children accurately within 45 days of Head Start enrollment. And the ASQ system has a dedicated social-emotional screener, ASQ®:SE-2, that reliably identifies concerns related to self-regulation, compliance, communication, adaptive behaviors, and more.

Ongoing screening with a reliable, valid, culturally appropriate tool. Not only is ASQ-3 the most reliable valid developmental screener available, it’s also been thoroughly reviewed for cultural sensitivity. Illustrations, wording, and examples in the questionnaires have been refined according to user feedback, so parents of diverse backgrounds can give the most accurate responses.

Screening with a tool that includes family members. ASQ is a parent-completed tool that makes parents and caregivers full partners in the screening process. The questions are reader-friendly, and helpful tips and illustrations give parents the guidance they need to give the most accurate responses.

Online management to streamline your screening program. Manage all of your ASQ-3 and ASQ:SE-2 data and allow parents to complete questionnaires on a secure website with ASQ ®Online. ASQ Online is a data exchange partner with ChildPlus, the most widely used Head Start program management software chosen by over 1,500 agencies, so you can save time and avoid data entry errors by importing your child data from ChildPlus into ASQ Online. Learn how.

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    What ASQ Users are Saying

    “ASQ-3 has helped make our staff and our families more aware of developmentally appropriate growth and development. The resources that come with the ASQ-3 have been instrumental for parents to provide school readiness activities at home and to understand the objectives that we cover in our plans.”

    Jessica Trail, Head of Faculty & Administration, The Young School