Eager to Learn Educating Our Preschoolers (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Assessment in Early Childhood Education
Assessment in Early Childhood Education
Pages 233-260
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From page 233... ...
Many teachers use tests or assessments to identify learning differences among students or to inform instructional planning. Widespread public concern to raise education standards has led states increasingly to use large-scale achievement tests as instruments of accountability (National Research Council, 1999a)
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From page 234... ...
Assessment to support learning, the first and most important of these purposes, refers to the use of assessments to provide teachers with information that can serve as a basis for pedagogical and curriculum decisions. Information presented in earlier chaptersabout early learning, about the episodic course of development in any given child and the enormous variability among young children in background and preparation for school, about the centrality of adult responsiveness to healthy cognitive and emotional development leads to the conclusion that what preschool teachers do to promote learning needs to be based on what each child brings to the interaction.
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From page 235... ...
These might include individual assessments of various sorts, standardized tests, observation, investigation of social and cultural background, and interviews. A corollary of this statement is that no test score should be looked on as infallible or immutable.
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From page 236... ...
could also pertain to assessment of older children and adults. But there are also developmental and cultural characteristics of young children that can be attended to more effectively in more flexible settings than is possible in most standardized testing environments (Bracken, 1987~.
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From page 237... ...
A modern industrial society like the United States that is technologically advanced, as Ogbu (1994) puts it, will possess a repertoire of cognitive skills appropriate for advanced technological culture.
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From page 238... ...
Many American Indian and African American subcultures do not cultivate the role of information giver that characterizes American middle-class children; the young are expected to learn through quietly observing adults (Heath, 1983~. In some communities, children are seldom direct conversational partners with adults; children eavesdrop on adults, while older children take on the task of directly teaching social and intellectual skills (Ward, 1971~.
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From page 239... ...
In a study of several hundred psychologists who work with young children, Bagnato and Neisworth (1994) found that only 4 percent of their respondents supported the use of norm-referenced, standardized intelligence tests for young children with developmental problems.
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From page 240... ...
Standardized, norm-referenced tests are particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation because they imply a degree of certainty that assessments of young children simply cannot provide. All of these cautionary statements about developmental and cultural issues and the potential shortcomings and misuses of standardized tests do not alter the fact that assessment is a key ingredient in the teaching and learning process.
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From page 241... ...
put it succinctly: "Assessing and teaching are inseparable processes." The idea behind the fusion of assessment and instruction is relatively simple and rests on three fundamental assumptions (Meisels and Atkins-Burnett, 2000~. The first is that assessment is a dynamic enterprise that calls on information from multiple sources collected over numerous time points, reflecting a wide range of child experiences and caregiver interpretations.
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From page 242... ...
As learning scientists, measurement experts, and practitioners gradually create a new science and practice of assessment, there are several useful assessment methods that can be used to help to dig beneath the surface of overt behavior to get at thought processes. Chapter 5 described the use of specially designed tasks that can help uncover a child's grasp of important concepts, for example, the idea of "quantity" that is fundamental to understanding mathematics or the idea of "representation" that underlies words and illustrations that is the foundation of literacy.
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From page 243... ...
In the clinical interview, the examiner's behavior is to some degree contingent on the child's; in standardized testing, the child's behavior is always contingent on the examiner's questions. The clinical interview permits the interviewer to formulate,
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From page 244... ...
Another study reported research involving administration of 10- to 15minute interviews by a mathematics specialist, who was then able to uncover difficulties hidden by correct responses on tests and to provide diagnostic information helpful to the teacher and the students' parents (Dionne and Fitzback-Labrecque, 1989~. Others have described how interview activities can be integrated into, and can indeed transform, classroom instruction (Ginsburg et al.,
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From page 245... ...
From this perspective, the role of assessment is to provide insight into the kind of educational experiences that will be most effective in helping particular children learn (Bodrova and Leong, 1996; Burns, 1996; Burns et al., 1992; Cronbach, 1990; Day et al., 1997; Ginsburg et al., 1999; Lidz and Pena, 1996) In recent years, the concepts of two major theorists, Lev Vygotsky and Reuven Feuerstein, have stimulated and legitimated efforts to develop assessment techniques designed to promote children's learning potential.
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From page 246... ...
) , then the test would have stopped with each child's standing immobilized at the end of the balance beam and the simple answer for both would be "No." But because the emphasis is on understanding each child's current level of functioning (each child's zone of proximal development)
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From page 247... ...
Important progress toward the development of a system to model growth, describe student difficulties, and identify and plan programs for children who warrant intervention early in their lives has been made; DIBELS's phonemic segmentation fluency measure demonstrates strong traditional reliability and validity and suggests promise in terms of its capacity to model student literacy growth. Additional research on DIBELS and other alternative systems to monitor children's development is needed to define their relative strengths and weaknesses.
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From page 248... ...
With this focus on the evidence of knowing as represented in concrete behaviors or products, competence is not assessed on the basis of a single performance. Performance assessments require multiple sources of information and multiple observations of the same or related phenomena before conclusions can be drawn.
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From page 249... ...
Assessment involves theorizing having informed ideas about the processes of learning and developing hypotheses about a child's strengths and deficits on the basis of assessment information. Instructional Assessment and Pedagogy When pedagogy is defined as it has been in this volume as an interactional construct that reflects a joint focus on the child's status and the characteristics of the educational setting two conditions are critical for the assessment of learning (see Meisels, 1999, for an elaboration of these ideas)
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From page 250... ...
250 EAGER TO LEARN tained opportunities for the interactions between teacher and child to occur, and, second, these interactions must occur over time, rather than on a single occasion. This view does not hold that one can round up all of the kindergarten children in a community on a given day and test them to determine what they know and can do.
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From page 251... ...
The Work Sampling System, designed for preschool-grade 5 (Meisels et al., 1994; Meisels, 1996b) , is one example of an assessment system designed to achieve these goals.
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From page 252... ...
Developmental Screening Developmental screening is a brief procedure designed to identify children at high risk for school failure. These are normreferenced standardized tests that typically evaluate a broad range of abilities, including intellectual, emotional, social, and
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From page 253... ...
Diagnostic Assessment Diagnostic assessment is intended to determine conclusively whether a child has special needs, ascertain the nature and character of the child's problems, and suggest the cause of the problems, if possible. According to federal law, diagnostic assessments administered by schools must be conducted in a team setting that utilizes multiple sources of data and is part of a system of special education services.
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From page 254... ...
Readiness Testing Readiness tests indicate a child's relative preparedness to participate in a particular classroom, rather than addressing general
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From page 255... ...
For example, many programs designed to prepare poor and immigrant children for kindergarten or first grade use readiness tests during the last year of preschool, typically at 5 years of age, to make promotion recommendations. It is interesting to note that what readiness tests measure is not well aligned with what teachers think is important.
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From page 256... ...
Readiness is a very complex construct, including intellectual and social abilities, and its assessment will be affected greatly by young children's episodic and unstable growth patterns and by variations in how children live and are raised. Some children may do very poorly on readiness tests at the outset of school simply because they were not exposed to or taught the items that are on tests.
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From page 257... ...
And since schools and programs differ, the fundamental requirement in every evaluation of a child's school readiness should be that the assessment is grounded in direct relevance to the criterion, namely, functioning in that school or program. These considerations have led many to conclude that readiness tests are not suited for use in child placement and promotion decisions, although they may have value for purposes of instructional planning (Meisels, 1987, 1989a, 1989b; Staliman and Pearson, 1990~.
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From page 258... ...
If the use of external standardized tests increases in the preschool environment for reasons of public policy, it is essential that they meet the highest standards of reliability and validity. Above all, any tests used for policy purposes must not be mistaken for statements about the learning trajectory of the individual child or allowed to diminish the importance of the kinds of assessments that will support learning.
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From page 259... ...
437~: When instruments and procedures designed for screening are used for diagnostic purposes, or when tests are administered by individuals who have a limited perspective on the variations of normal development, or when staff with little formal training in test administration perform the screening, children can be wrongly identified and their education jeopardized. We have written at length about the need for a fusion of assessment and instruction in early childhood settings.
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From page 260... ...
Moreover, assessment in early childhood tends to be considered external and irrelevant to the teaching and learning process, rather than something that can complement educational programs and, indeed, is essential to making the program work for each child. If we are to use the important findings about human learning from the cognitive, neurological, and developmental sciences to improve early childhood pedagogy and instruction, it is important that early childhood educators and caregivers be trained to use assessments for purposes that will advance teaching and learning (Arter, 1999; Brookhart, 1999; Jones and Chittenden, 1995; Meisels, 1999; Sheingold et al., 1995; Stiggins, 1991, 1999~.
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