ASSESSMENT
I believe that Early Childhood Assessment should be developmentally appropriate and holistic. Assessment should not only focus on cognitive skills but in all areas of development. We, as teachers, should also make it a habit to regularly assess our students' social, emotional, physical and cognitive development. Aside from formal assessments, we can also do naturalistic observations and observe our students everyday, through routines and activities and write down running records or anecdotal records. Doing this daily helps us see the child more and understand and see patterns of behaviors and his/her skills, interests and current level. Assessment should also not be limited to paper and pencil tasks but involve more or performance-based assessment.
According to the Philippines Education for All 2015: Implementation and Changes (UNESCO, nd), school age children here are now normally given achievement and diagnostic tests. Their reading skills in turn are assessed using the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI). However, as we can see, the focus of these tests are cognitive skills. I think there is a need for tests to be developed by the country to assess Filipino children's other aspects of development. Some schools here even use standardized tests that are culturally inappropriate because the tests are made by western countries. This then raises the question of validity of the test scores if some questions are cultural based. We, as a country, still have a long way to go in terms of developing Filipino based assessment scales and tests, but hopefully we do get there.
Developmental Assessment should be used for its intended purpose - for planning and teaching (NAEYC, 2003). We assess so that we can come up with the appropriate objectives for each child depending on their skills and weaknesses and then plan for each child and provide for their needs. We also assess so that we can refer, and NOT to label.
Sources:
NAEYC, (2003) Position Statement on Curriculum, Assessment and Program Evaluation. Retrieved from
http://www.naeyc.org
