Before we delve into what Child-Friendly Assessments are, lets first look at the concept of assessment. Assessment in simple terms is studying someone for a period of time and then deriving an inference about them, their behaviour patterns or their skills. We do it everyday starting with when we meet someone for the first time to someone we have known for years. We are continuously involved in this process and are unconsciously conducting assessments in our daily lives. This article will try to explain how as a teacher you can conduct assessments consciously and make them work as a professional teaching tool in an early childhood setting.

Consider yourself in an ECE classroom of 3 to 5 year old children. You have been asked to conduct a professional assessment. In order to do this you need to know what to assess, how to assess, and what to do with the assessment?

To start the assessment process you have to have focus. Focus is achieved by gaining knowledge about all domains of a child’s development: physical, cognitive, emotional and social. This knowledge makes you conscious while you are observing the child, i.e. you only observe and record facts about the child's actual developmental abilities and avoid recording your personal point of view. It also helps you develop fair expectations from each child, knowing that all children are unique and develop at their own individual pace.

Now that you have focus in your observations you need to know what methods are available to you, so you can professionally assess the information you have gathered. Traditionally there are three types of assessments: Diagnostic, Formative and Summative. All three types should ideally be employed together but that is not always possible, due to the constraints of a teacher’s other professional responsibilities.

The first of these, Diagnostic Assessment is the conscious assessment that you usually perform when you meet the child for the first time, like your first impressions about the child's potential. This type of assessment helps in forming a baseline assessment of the child when s/he first comes to you at the beginning of the school year. In practice diagnostic assessments can be done in the form of initial screening interviews with parents, observations and in some cases entrance tests. Diagnostic assessments can also be utilised during the school year as an analytical tool to help pinpoint a specific delay in a child's academic performance or development. In this way diagnostic assessments help compliment and support formative assessments.

Through out the rest of the year you conduct ongoing assessments and these are known as Formative assessments. Formative assessments are used as an ongoing evaluation tool. They are an essential component of the assessment process, as they help you gather valuable information about the child's continuing academic performance and development. Formative assessments assist teachers in adapting their learning environments, teaching strategies and practices to better match the child's dynamic developmental needs.

Black writes about summative assessment (Brookhart, 1999),"When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment; when the customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment". Summative assessment is a test, usually given at the end of a term, semester, year, or the like. The purpose of this assessment type is again evaluative, but as the analogy states it happens when little or nothing can be done to change or modify the soup’s taste. In our case, as teachers we would be hard pressed to help the child if some developmental shortcoming is identified in the end of term summative assessment.

As you might have noticed by now that there is a fair amount of observation that is involved in the assessment process. So the question that comes to mind is how can a teacher observe and record everything that happens in a classroom? Because the teacher doesn’t always have the luxury to step back, s/he has to be an active player in the classroom setting and has to actively engage with children and take part in their activities. This is a skill you have to develop, to be actively involved, picking up cues from the children and at the same time observing each individual child. By recording observations regularly and efficiently, you will build up comprehensive academic and developmental evidence for each child. This will help you to be aware of all areas of the child's learning and development. The methods of assessment and record-keeping for you to follow are given below:

Checklist of Children’s Progress
In a register, you should maintain a monthly checklist for each child, using the knowledge of the child's developmental domains and curricular goals. You can record any special comments you may want to remember about a child, in this register. In the last week of each month, as you carry out your daily routine, keep your register handy to observe the children in your class. If you record your observations of five to six children a day, you will easily cover the entire class each month. It may seem difficult at first, but with a little practice you will see the value of the information you have at hand and it will not seem difficult anymore.

Portfolio of Children’s Work
At the beginning of the academic year get a file or folder for each child. Write the child's full name, parents’ name, address, date of birth, date of admission and any other relevant information on the cover.

In this portfolio you should maintain each child's art work and other worksheets. Each sheet should have the child's name and complete date on which the work was done, written clearly on it. The portfolio will help you assess the progress children have made in their art work, writing and understanding of maths related concepts. At the end of the academic year, before they take their portfolios home, let the children decorate their folders by colouring or pasting pictures on it.

Progress Report for Parents
At the end of each term invite the parents to a meeting to your classroom, to discuss their child's progress. You can show them what their child has learnt and share his/her portfolio with them. Twice a year you should complete and share with parents a progress report of their child. This report will be based on his/her developmental domains and curricular goals. To make judgements about the progress of the child and to support your evaluations, use your observations, monthly checklists and the work in the portfolio.

This was half the pie of Child Friendly Assessments. Now let’s look at the other equally important half. How can you make your assessments child friendly? Inherently when you employ assessment techniques in their traditional form they are child friendly, as they assess children’s individual abilities, behaviour patterns and skills. They provide you with real-time data about the child's development and academic progress. This helps modify your teaching practices and lesson plans so as to match the needs of the child. In reality though, knowledge of assessment and its techniques alone is not enough to make its application child friendly. To achieve this we need to try and practice the principles of Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP), sensitivity and confidentiality while conducting assessments. These principles act as guiding ethical standards that help protect and safeguard the child’s rights.

DAP lends itself to the process of assessment by providing teachers with guidelines that help them understand each child's uniqueness and individuality through age appropriateness.

This means that while assessing you remember that every two year old can’t do things a three year old child can do, although there are always some exceptions. But keeping this concept in mind will let you assess the age appropriateness of the task or activity the child is engaged in, as it would not be a just assessment if a three year old is observed while s/he was given a task which is age appropriate for a four year old child.

DAP helps youz develop a fair expectation in the abilities of each individual child in group-care by relating assessments to Developmental Appropriateness. For instance, Aslam and Hadia, are both three years old, born in the same month, joined school at the same time and have had more or less the same experiences at school. Does this mean that both of them will develop at the same developmental pace? No, and this is what developmental appropriateness encourages you to think about. In doing so, it prevents you not only from having unfair expectations but also stops you from comparing the children and their abilities against each other, thereby making them equals and not ‘one better than the other’.

DAP also allows you to take account of each child's distinctive family and community backgrounds while passing inferences about their development, thus making their assessment process culturally appropriate.

DAP makes you receptive to the child's developmental needs. However while assessing you also have to look after the child's right to feel safe and protected while being observed. Sensitivity in assessment refers to guidelines by way of which you prevent yourself from:

Forcing the child to continue with an activity if they don’t want to, even if it is an activity for which you want to assess that child's ability.

Conducting an assessment which does not benefit the child and is being done just for the sake of assessment

Now that you are aware of the child's needs (DAP) and his/her right to feel safe (sensitivity) you also have to provide the child, his/her right to protection in order for your assessment practices to be truly child friendly. This we achieve by practicing the concept of confidentiality. It simply means that you treat all the information you have gathered about the child through observations, checklists, child portfolios and parent meetings as a secret. A secret kept from other school teachers and your friends/families. The only people who can have access to the child's information are the class teacher, other school assigned assessor/s, school administration and the child's parents. This practice helps protect the child from being labeled as a genius or a lazy and dull child by allowing others to form their own fresh impressions of the child and his abilities, providing all children an equal opportunity to progress without being treated with too much special attention or none at all.

If now after reading this article you feel that conducting professional assessments will not be as easy an undertaking as you had first thought, just remind yourself of the many times you too could have personally benefited in your own childhood, if someone was conducting a child friendly assessment on you in your school setting. An assessment that could have helped you not only understand your own individual abilities and skills, but also provide you with the means; a receptive teacher, a dynamic learning environment and an adaptive curriculum to help you develop holistically.

A Checklist for Teachers

Assessment of individual children's development and learning is essential for planning and implementing appropriate curriculum. In developmentally appropriate programmes, assessment and curriculum are integrated, with teachers continually engaging in observational assessment for the purpose of improving teaching and learning. To carry out assessments in a child friendly manner, teachers should keep certain guidelines in mind. These have been summarized below in the form of a checklist.

References
Brookhart, S.M. (1999). Wiggins, Grant. (1998). Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved August 14, 2007, from http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev50.htm

Mahmud, Mahenaz (2003). Strong Foundations: A Guide for ECE Teachers. Karachi: Teachers’ Resource Centre. http://www.naeyc.org/about/positions/dap4.asp

(For a more complete discussion of principles of appropriate assessment, see the position statement Guidelines for Appropriate Curriculum Content and Assessment for Children Ages 3 through 8 [NAEYC & NAECS/SDE 1992]; see also Shepard 1994.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ghazanfar is part of the Training and Develpoment team at theTeachers’ Resource Centre (TRC). He holds a two year diploma in Early Childhood Education (ECE) from Sheridan College, Canada and a Montessori Teacher Training Certificate from AMI, Holland.