ECIPs Foundations & Guiding Principles
By age five, a child’s brain will have reached this percentage of its adult size.
What is 90%?
True or False: The ECIPs are designed to serve as a standardized curriculum or formal test.
What is False? (The ECIPs are a learning standards framework, not a curriculum, assessment, or diagnostic tool)
This term refers to cognitive control skills that allow people to direct behavior toward goals, filtering distractions and managing impulses.
What is Executive Function?
True or False: Research shows that learning a home language alongside English delays English acquisition in early childhood.
What is False?
Rote counting (saying numbers in standard order from memory without needing to know quantity) is classified under Subcomponent M1 as this type of counting.
What is Counting in the Standard Order?
The Minnesota ECIPs framework spans development and learning progressions across this full age range.
What is birth to kindergarten entrance (or birth to age five)?
Effective learning in early childhood occurs best when children are active participants engaging in this type of activity rather than teacher-led passive learning.
What is play (or exploration/active learning)?
The three core components of executive function highlighted in the ECIPs are working memory, cognitive flexibility, and this control skill.
What is Inhibitory Control?
Receptive language skills focus on listening and understanding, whereas expressive language skills focus on these two actions.
What are communicating and speaking?
When a child touches each block once while saying "1, 2, 3, 4", they demonstrate this mathematical counting principle (Subcomponent M2).
What is One-to-One Counting (or One-to-One Correspondence)?
In Minnesota, successful learners are understood as the product of four components within this framework equation.
What is the Successful Learner Equation?
This ongoing cycle of best practices involves three continuous steps centered around standard indicators.
What is the planning / observation / reflection (authentic assessment) cycle?
Before young children develop internal self-regulation, they first learn to regulate emotions through this process with trusted caregivers.
What is Co-Regulation?
Component LLC5 focuses on this skill: hearing and understanding the separate sounds that make up spoken language.
What is Phonological Awareness?
The understanding that the last number said when counting a set tells the total number of objects in that set is known as this concept (Subcomponent M3).
What is Cardinality?
The 2024 ECIPs revision emphasized an equity-focused approach embedding these four principles.
What are Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility?
Authentic assessment should be completed in a child's natural environment by individuals who fit this criteria.
Who are people who know the child well?
Under component AL4 (Choice Making), a child aged 4–5 demonstrates choice-making progression by taking this step before acting.
What is creating a plan to achieve a goal?
When 4-5 year olds spell words using chosen, non-standard, or unusual letters based on sound-symbol connections, they are demonstrating this writing convention (LLC9.12).
What is Invented Spelling?
This term refers to a child's ability to quickly and accurately label small sets of objects (such as seeing 4 dots on a die) without counting them individually (M4.5, M4.7).
What is Subitizing?
These are the four foundational structural levels of the ECIPs framework, listed from largest domain concept down to observable behavior expectations.
What are Domains, Components, Subcomponents, and Indicators?
The ECIPs outline that young children should never be denied access or eligibility to programs based on the standards, making them this type of tool rather than a gatekeeping measure.
What is a framework to inform instructional decisions and developmental support?
Under Subcomponent AL10 (Flexible Thinking), an indicator for 4–5 year olds involves considering other points of view and doing this when presented with new information.
What is changing their opinion or idea?
Orientation, understanding that text runs left-to-right, and identifying parts of a book fall under this subcomponent (LLC7).
What are Concepts of Print?
Subcomponent M7 measures a child's ability to match number words to sequence positions using terms like "first," "second," and "last," which is known as this concept.
What is Ordinality?