South Carolina is committed to supporting early learning for all young children and uses the Childhood Outcomes Summary (COS) Process to measure childhood outcomes. This process is intended to respond to the federal requirements for reporting child outcomes to OSEP and to enable the state to monitor children’s development to support effective intervention and inform decisions about program improvement for eligible young children.
COS is a team process that summarizes information about a child’s functioning across multiple sources; positive social-emotional skills (including social relationships), acquisition and use of knowledge and skills, and the use of appropriate behaviors to meet needs. The outcomes are measured according to the extent to which children are making or not making progress as a result of receiving early childhood special education services.
- The ECTA Center and DaSy Center developed an online learning module that provides key information about the COS process, and the practices that contribute to consistent and meaningful COS decision-making. Child Outcomes Summary LMS (ectacenter.org)
- South Carolina also has a course available in the Learning Management System that encompasses the module mentioned above as well as a knowledge check and information about state-level COS data. This course may be accessed by completing the following and is worth 20 educator renewal credits:
- Create a profile in the OSES LMS. Please check your junk/spam mailbox if you do not receive your confirmation email within two hours.
- Once you have created a profile, you will be able to manually enroll in the course: ECTA DaSy Child Outcomes Summary.
- The Childhood Outcomes Summary Knowledge Check (COS-KC) is a tool to examine whether practitioners have sufficient knowledge to participate in the COS team process so that they can produce accurate ratings for child outcomes measurement. The COS-KC is a free, online, open-book assessment with 30 multiple-choice items. It was developed by the Center for IDEA Early Childhood Data Systems (DaSy) and the Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (ECTA) and is being used nationally. If you take the course in South Carolina’s Learning Management System, this knowledge check is embedded in the course. If you wish to independently access the knowledge check, follow the following steps:
- Please sign up for the COS-KC at https://coskc.dasyonline.org/#!/login
- After you sign up, you will receive an automated email from "DaSy Center <noreply@dasyonline.org>" asking you to click on a link to activate your account. The COS-KC system takes you to a few registration questions to complete before starting the assessment.
- To begin the assessment, click on the button in the practitioner dashboard that says, ‘Start the COS-KC.’ The assessment should take 45 minutes to an hour to complete. There is no need to complete the assessment in one sitting! The system saves your progress if you need to pause the assessment and return later.
- The assessment is “open book” so feel free to use any helpful resources or tools listed below during the assessment such as the Child Outcomes Summary (COS) Process Quick Reference Guide.
- Upon completion of the COS-KC, you will receive immediate feedback as to whether you passed the assessment. For those who pass, the system generates a Certificate of Achievement. Those who do not pass the first time may retake the COS-KC after a waiting period of 24 hours. We highly recommend reviewing COS resources before making a second attempt to pass the COS-KC.