WEEK: 6 Early Childhood Development Assessing Young Children

WEEK: 6 

Early Childhood Development

Assessing school- age children in America and in other parts of the world.

 Assessment is the process of gathering information about a student in order to make decisions about his or her education. 

 Assessment is a great way to chart a child’s progress over time, provide feedback to a child’s parents, or help with classroom management and discipline.  

The primary reasons for assessment identified in the literature are to screen for disabilities; to assess academic readiness; to assist in developing curriculum and daily activities; to evaluate the effectiveness of a project or a program; and to provide feedback to parents (Bredekamp 1992) .

The purposes of assessments are to support learning, identify special needs, evaluate a program, monitor trends, and serve high stakes accountability requirements (Shepard 1998).  

 One kind of assessment is testing.

In elementary and secondary schools, tests are given routinely to measure the extent to which we profit from instruction. 

Students may have taken intelligence, aptitude, interest, personality tests or any number of other kinds of tests. 

Testing means presenting a person with a set of questions or tasks in order to obtain a measure of performance often represented by a score. 

The score is intended to help answer questions and produce information about the person tested.


"One of the major advantages of standardized tests is that the results can be used to compare a child to developmental norms or to children in similar circumstances.

 A norm is an average or series of averages obtained on the sample of children used in developing the test" ( Shepard 1998).

"Children who perform well on standardized tests in the preschool years tend to also perform well on tests in kindergarten and in the early elementary years" (Bredekamp 1992).



According to the National Education Goals Panel, a government-appointed committee and extension of the goals education movement,
 guidelines assessments should: 

bring about benefits for children;

be tailored to a specific purpose; 

be reliable, valid, and fair;

bring about and reflect policies that acknowledge that as the age of the child
increases, reliability and validity of the assessment increases; 

 be age-appropriate in both content and methodology; 

 be linguistically appropriate because all assessments measure language; and 

value parents as an important source of assessment information. 

The following are examples of additional assessment tools, one or more of which could be included in a quality assessment system for young children. When used together in an assessment system, these tools will yield meaningful and useful information to teachers, parents, and administrators.




             

            Observations and Checklists

A well-defined checklist with observation training is critical and essential for an assessment system. 

Observations of child behaviors and skills provide the teacher with a powerful measure of a child’s abilities. 

For example, a teacher observation of a child retelling what happened last night at home with a big smile and expressive language is a truer measure of oral language skills than asking the child to retell a story in an unfamiliar setting. 

Anecdotal Records

 Anecdotal records are short, factual, narrative descriptions of child behaviors and skills over time. 

Anecdotal records should be as objective as possible and only a few sentences long. “Gina, age 4.10, chose the library center today. 

She pretended to read Peter Rabbit to two doll babies and Jessica. 

She turned each page and recited with expression the memorized words on each page. She showed the picture at each page turn.”

Running Record

 Running records are similar to anecdotal records but are much longer. 

An observer objectively writes in a narrative format everything the child did and said for a specific time period such as thirty minutes. 

Running records are especially helpful in analyzing social skill development or behavior concerns. 

Running records also can be narrowly focused to a subject area such as a running record that documents the accuracy and miscue strategies of a child reading a specific passage. 

Portfolios 

A portfolio is a flexible and adaptable collection over time of various concrete work samples showing many dimensions of the child’s learning.

 This type of assessment tool is particularly ideal for use in the primary grades when children are developing knowledge and skills in several subject areas at different rates. 

This type of assessment also focuses on the child’s strengths and demonstrations of knowledge and skills.

Home Inventories 

Parents may see behaviors and skills that children demonstrate in only the home setting. Home inventories collect valuable information through a survey or set of short, open-ended response items completed by the adult at the child’s home.

 Developmental Screenings

 Developmental screenings are a short (15–20 minutes) set of age- and content appropriate performance items based on a developmental continuum and linked to ages typical for the behavior. 

This type of assessment is helpful in identifying major developmental delays that indicate the need for a more thorough diagnostic assessment. 

Screening assessments should not necessarily screen out a child as “not ready,” but rather serve as a guide for instruction that reveals the subject areas for which the child is ready to begin learning. 

This type of assessment can also provide guidance for the program needs. 

Diagnostic Assessments 

A diagnostic assessment identifies a range of strengths and weaknesses in the child and suggests specific remedial actions. 

Classroom diagnostic assessments are not direct measures of academic outcome and should never be used for accountability purposes alone.

 Standardized Assessments 

Standardized assessments are typically administered in groups and provide normative data that can be aggregated and reported to administrators and policymakers. 

Standardized assessments are direct measures of children’s outcomes and are administered under very stringent protocols. 

Standardized assessments are also used to monitor trends and for program evaluation and accountability. 

Typically, standardized assessments are paper/pencil-based and designed to capture only the child’s response without administrator bias.

Quality assessments have the following benefits:

They give teachers valuable and individualized information about children’s developing skills and knowledge.

They lead the teacher to select quality early childhood activities and instruction.

They provide information that helps administrators strengthen existing programs and hold them accountable.

Most of all, developmentally appropriate assessments benefit young children by helping teachers ensure that a young child’s educational journey springs from a solid foundation of basic skills.

School - aged children assessed in Turkey

Standardized testing is controversial everywhere, regardless of its purpose. 

Most countries use testing for tracking and for selecting students for admission into academic secondary schools or universities, but generally not for holding educators accountable. 

Many countries don't even administer standardized tests until the later grades. 

In fact, most Canadian universities don't require the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or other standardized admissions tests—except for students applying with a U.S. high school diploma! 

Turkey's heavily bureaucratic and centralized education system is modeled after the French system. 

It has been called “more French than the French system” (Simsek 2004, p.155) because French schools have undergone changes in the past 20 years that have not taken place in Turkish schools. 

However, Turkey's attempts to reduce the emphasis on rote learning have had limited success. 

Turkey is a developing country with limited resources, high poverty rates, and relatively low access to secondary and higher education. 

It also has one of the highest birthrates in the world, which stretches the country's scarce education resources thin. 

These factors affect how national examinations play out in the country. 

Examinations in Turkey are first administered at the end of basic education, although they influence what schools teach long before that. 

These exams determine admission into the prestigious Anatolian and science high schools, which accept approximately one-quarter of the students who take the exam. 

Students who wish to enter a university must take another nationwide exam at the end of high school; but because demand outweighs available spaces, acceptance rates are low (around 20 percent). 

Because of these conditions, Turkish students experience “some of the world's worst exam anxiety” (Simsek 2004, p.165)

References:

Bredekamp, S., & Rosegrant, T. (Eds.). (1992). Reaching potentials: Appropriate curriculum    and assessment for young children (Vol. 1). Washington, DC: National Association for the    Education of Young Children.

National Association for the Education of Young Children & National Association of Early    Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education. (1990). Guidelines for  appropriate curriculum content and assessment in programs serving children ages 3  through 8. (Position statement). Washington, DC: NAEYC. Retrieved from  http://www.naeyc.org/resources/position_statements/pscuras.ht

Simsek, H., & Yildirim, A. (2004). Turkey: Innovation and tradition. In I. C. Rotberg (Ed.),    Balancing change and tradition in global education reform (pp. 153–185). Lanham, MD:    ScarecrowEducation.

Shepard, L., Kagan, S.L., Wurtz, E. (Eds.). (1998). Principles and recommendations for        early childhood assessments. Washington, DC: National Education Goals Panel.