Samuel J Meisels

Education

Meisels received his bachelor's degree with high honors in philosophy from the University of Rochester in 1967. He then enrolled in a doctoral program at Harvard University in education and philosophy. While a graduate student at Harvard, Meisels was exposed to the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget's revolutionary ideas about children and epistemology motivated him to spend time in classrooms as a teacher of preschool, kindergarten, and first grade while completing his doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Professional Positions

In 1972 Meisels accepted a position at Tufts University as a faculty member and director of the Eliot-Pearson Children's School, a university laboratory school in the Department of Child Study. From 1979-80 he served as Senior Advisor in Early Childhood Development in the Developmental Evaluation Clinic of the Children's Hospital Medical Center at Boston before joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in the fall of 1980. During his twenty-one years at Michigan he held several positions including that of research scientist at the Center for Human Growth, professor in the School of Education, and interim dean and associate dean of research in the Education School. In 2002 Dr. Meisels became the president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development; located in Chicago, Illinois. Under Meisels's leadership, Erikson engaged in applied research in the Chicago Public Schools, expanded its clinical programs for children and families, added new community-based interventions for children from birth to age 8, initiated professional development programs online and in person for Pre-K - Grade 3 throughout the Midwest, and built a new campus. In June 2013 Meisels left Erikson to become the founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska where his also a professor child, youth, and family studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and holds courtesy appointments on the other university campuses as a professor of public health, public administration and education.

Contributions to Developmental Screening and Educational Assessment

Meisels’s earliest work demonstrated his interest in theory-based instructional approaches in early childhood classrooms. He has also contributed to research in the areas of developmental screening, inclusion of young children with special needs in regular educational programs, developmental consequences of high-risk birth, applying child development theory as a lens through which to view young children with special needs, readiness for school, and performance assessment of young children.

Meisels has long been an advocate of fairness in assessment of children. He has written extensively about the use of alternative assessment strategies that are authentic, performance-based, and developmentally appropriate for young children and those in the early elementary grades. His commitment to fairness, equity, practicality, and accuracy, as well as his concern regarding assessments that were being widely used to sort children into educational settings that were developmentally inappropriate, motivated him to develop the Work Sampling System (WSS), a performance assessment for children from age 3 to Grade 3.

He and his colleagues also created a developmental screening instrument to identify children between three and six years of age who were at risk for learning and behavior problems - the Early Screening Inventory•Revised (“ESI•R”). This highly valid screening instrument identifies children who can benefit from early intervention services.

The Work Sampling System

The Work Sampling System is ground-breaking in several respects. Constructivist in orientation, WSS gives teachers a perspective on children and their development unavailable from conventional achievement tests. The developmental observations recorded three times yearly enable teachers to document what children are learning in relation to standards, the progress they are making, and their specific strengths and areas of weakness.

The Work Sampling System has been in use across the United States for more than three decades. It has been revised repeatedly, has undergone extensive validation, and was the subject of several peer reviewed empirical studies that documented its validity.

Dr. Meisels and his colleagues have written a handbook for teacher educators that describes how to incorporate WSS into teacher preparation programs.

The Ounce Scale

Dr. Meisels and his colleagues have also published the Ounce Scale: An Observational Assessment for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, an authentic performance assessment that can be used with children from infancy to age three. In addition to the development of these assessment instruments, Meisels has prepared two books for parents and edited handbooks for the field. He has served on numerous editorial boards as a reviewer and editor. Buffett Early Childhood Institute