Assessment in Early Childhood Essay

According to Ann Landers, it is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. The subject of children’s achievement and performance in school, and even before school, has received increasing public attention during the latter 1980s and early 1990s. Over the years educators has seek various methods of assessment to evaluate students. According to Pett, (1990), educators use the term Authentic Assessment to define the practice of realistic student involvement in evaluation of their own achievement. One method of Authentic Assessment is to assemble and review a portfolio of the child’s work. Venn, (2000), stated that portfolio is a systematic collection of students work and related materials that depicts a student’s activities, accomplishment and achievement in one or more areas of the curriculum. In this era performance assessment related to the monitoring of students’ mastery of a core curriculum, portfolios can enhance the assessment process by revealing a range of skills and understandings of young children in Early Childhood Education. The wide use of portfolio can stimulate a shift in classroom practices and education polices. According to Meisels and Steele (1991), portfolios enable children to participate in assessing their own work, keep track of individual children’s progress and provide a basis for evaluating the quality of individual children’s overall performance. There are many benefits of using portfolios in the early childhood classroom. Portfolio assessment has become widely used in educational settings as a way to examine and measure children’s progress, by documenting the process of learning or changes as it occurs. For example if parents feel the need to evaluate their child’s progress in the classroom; the portfolio will be available for this purpose. Hence, with the aid of the teacher and evidence of their child’s portfolio parent will have an understanding of how their child is performing. Another benefit of using the portfolio is that it gives students the opportunity to have extensive input into the learning process and shows depth in their work. According to Murphy and Smith (1990), portfolios can be intended to motivate students and promote learning through reflection and self-assessment. Involving students in selecting their own pieces which are done without pressure and time constrains allow them to assess and give themselves a better understanding of their own work and identify what are their strengths and weaknesses. For example little Johnny is in K2 and his class teacher Miss McLaughlin gives him Art pieces to do on Fridays, at the end of doing all those pieces little Johnny was given the opportunity to choose his favourite piece and tell why he choose that sample of work. On-going feedback is another benefit that portfolio provides. In the early childhood classroom portfolio contains a wide variety of work samples, including successive drafts of work on particular projects/theme in the curriculum. Hence, while evaluating students’ progress, teachers would be able to conclusions about a child’s abilities, achievement, weaknesses, strengths and needs. The conclusion will be based on the child’s development, documentations made in the portfolio and on the teacher’s knowledge of curriculum and stages of development. Finally, when the evaluation progress is completed the teacher can use portfolios to provide students general feedback about the quality of their work; in addition this portfolio can be displayed during parent-teacher association (P. T. A) meetings. Students can also select pieces of their work to include in the portfolio. This encourages students to reflect on their past work and gather useful guidelines for improvement. For instance, kindergarteners are at the pre writing level, hence they tend to complete more hands-on and concrete work at this stage. The facilitator may take a photograph of a child’s completed block structure during the first, second or third semester of the year to show the child’s progress in development. Many teachers use portfolios to evaluate how a student progresses over an extended period of time. The portfolio normally contains the best samples of work done by a student, as well as various students’ work that most demonstrate their strengths and skills. It should be noted that all materials placed in a portfolio should be organized by chronological order and or categorized. Meisels and Steele (1991) believe that the materials placed in the portfolio should be organized in accordance to curriculum area or category of development, such as cognitive, gross motor, fine motor and so forth. Once the portfolio is organized, the teacher can evaluate the child’s achievements. Appropriate evaluation should always be done by the teacher in regards to the comparison of the child’s current work to his or her previous work. When the teacher is evaluating, he or she will be able to draw conclusions about a child’s abilities, achievement, weaknesses, strengths and needs. The conclusion will be based on the child’s development, documentations made in the portfolio and on the teacher’s knowledge of curriculum and stages of development. Finally, when the evaluation progress is completed the teacher can use portfolios to provide students general feedback about the quality of their work; in addition this portfolio can be displayed during parent-teacher association (P. T. A) meetings. Students can also select pieces of their work to include in the portfolio. This encourages students to reflect on their past work and gather useful guidelines for improvement.