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
UNESCO, (nd).Philippines Education for All 2015: Implementation and Changes. Retrieved fom http://planipolis.iiep.unesco.org/
posted by Elizabeth King Santos @ 7:45 AM
5 Comments:
I totally agree that teachers need to look at the social and emotional development of children. Those two are just as important as academics. All children are necessarily scholars so it is vital to provide opportunity's for no scholarly children to succeed all are going to play a role in the future members of our society. Nice explanation.
I completely agree with you about the idea of continual assessment of our children. It is really the only way to ensure they are learning and to help them continue to develop mentally and physically.
Elizabeth, I also agree that assessment should be developmentally appropriate and holistic; you also made a wonderful point; teachers should keep anecdotal records of student behavior; I think this is a wonderful informal assessment that can yield informative information about the child’s behavior and cognitive ability. While completing the observation requirement for this course, I have gained many insightful insights regarding children’s biosocial and cognitive development. You can witness theory come alive right before your eyes; this fact has authenticated to me why anecdotal records are so critical in early childhood. Have you witnessed theory come alive in fulfilling your observation requirement?
Elizabeth,
I agree that early childhood assessment should be holistic. As a result, I think that teh best type of assessment is authentic assessment that focuses on the individual needs of the child.
I really enjoyed your post. I have visited the Philippines on a number of occasions and was very close to working at an International School in Manila before i took the position in Thailand. In Thailand the govt schools have a basic no fail policy that forces teachers to find ways to pass the students. Although there are many negatives to this system, some teachers have found ways to assess a child based on what they have a natural inclination towards and have found that when they are able to have the time to find what a child is good at, they are able to get the child much more focused and engaged in the classroom. Unfortunately, many of the class sizes range from 35-50+ students and makes it very difficult for teachers to spend the additional one on one time necessary to find what areas a child excels in. I have always felt that if schools would implement a testing for multiple intelligences they could atleast begin to categorize children based on what type of intelligence they seem to excel in and then place them in classes where that intelligence is used more often.
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