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:
