Assessment is important because of all the decisions you will
make about children when teaching them. The decisions facing our three teachers
all involve how best to educate children. Like them, you will be called upon
every day to make decisions before, during, and after your teaching. Whereas
some of these decisions will seem small and inconsequential, others will be
“high stakes,” influencing the life course of children. All of your assessment
decisions taken as a whole will direct and alter children’s learning
outcomes. Below outlines for you some purposes of assessment and how
assessment can enhance your teaching and student learning. All of these
purposes are important; if you use assessment procedures appropriately, you
will help all children learn well.
The
following general principles should guide both policies and practices for the
assessment of young children:
Assessment should bring about benefits for children. Gathering
accurate information from young children is difficult and potentially
stressful. Assessments must have a clear benefit—either in direct services to
the child or in improved quality of educational programs.
Assessment should be tailored to a specific purpose and should
be reliable, valid, and fair for that purpose. Assessments designed for one
purpose are not necessarily valid if used for other purposes. In the past, many
of the abuses of testing with young children have occurred because of misuse.
Assessment policies should be designed recognizing that
reliability and validity of assessments increase with children’s age. The
younger the child, the more difficult it is to obtain reliable and valid
assessment data. It is particularly difficult to assess children’s cognitive
abilities accurately before age six. Because of problems with reliability and
validity, some types of assessment should be postponed until children are
older, while other types of assessment can be pursued, but only with necessary safeguards.
Assessment should be age appropriate in both content and the
method of data collection. Assessments of young children should address the
full range of early learning and development, including physical well-being and
motor development; social and emotional development; approaches toward
learning; language development; and cognition and general knowledge. Methods of
assessment should recognize that children need familiar contexts to be able to
demonstrate their abilities. Abstract paper-and-pencil tasks may make it
especially difficult for young children to show what they know.
Assessment should be linguistically appropriate, recognizing
that to some extent all assessments are measures of language. Regardless of
whether an assessment is intended to measure early reading skills, knowledge of
color names, or learning potential, assessment results are easily confounded by
language proficiency, especially for children who come from home backgrounds
with limited exposure to English, for whom the assessment would essentially be
an assessment of their English proficiency. Each child’s first- and
second-language development should be taken into account when determining
appropriate assessment methods and in interpreting the meaning of assessment
results.
Parents should be a valued source of assessment information,
as well as an audience for assessment. Because of the fallibility of direct
measures of young children, assessments should include multiple sources of
evidence, especially reports from parents and teachers. Assessment results
should be shared with parents as part of an ongoing process that involves
parents in their child’s education.4
Purposes of Assessment
Identify what children know
Identify children's special needs
Determine appropriate placement
Select appropriate curricula to meet children's individual
needs
Enjoy,
Ms. Nora Sierra
Early Childhood Coordinator
Kindergarten Teacher
Discovery School
