Early learning standards have been articulated in an effort to improve and create cohesion between and within informal and formal learning environments for young children. To fulfill these goals, early learning standards need to be implemented in a manner that is: (1) tailored to the variable nature of early childhood development, (2) adapted for the diverse and decentralized landscape of early learning communities, and (3) embedded within curricular planning and assessment to create a platform for professional development that is easily integrated into the daily practice of early care providers. This document provides an overview of the literature in regards to these three themes before proposing a dissertation project to validate and examine the convergent and social validity of an approach to curricular planning and assessment that utilizes early standards as an umbrella framework. The proposed work contributes to research on early learning assessment by offering a means of: (1) introducing standards without requiring standardization, (2) examining program quality that does not involve assessing individual children, (3) tracking the relative contribution of teachers and children to classroom activity, and (4) examining the distribution of different types of developmental activity across and within five different domains of child development.