Assessment and Documentation in Early Childhood Education

Maarit Alasuutari, Ann-Marie Markström, Ann-Christine Vallberg-Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317817062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Documentation in early childhood education is typically seen as a means to enhance the quality of care and education, and as a way to take account of the child's view.

Assessment and Documentation in Early Childhood Education considers the increasing trend towards systematic child documentation especially in early childhood institutions. The authors present ways in which assessment and evaluation is done sometimes explicitly but more often implicitly in these practices, and explore its means, aims, forms, and functions. They also examine the rationalities of child documentation from the perspective of professional practice and professionalism and suggest that documentation and assessment practices can weaken and constrain but also empower and strengthen teachers, children and parents. Topics explored include:

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• Different forms of documentation and assessment

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• Documentation and listening to the children

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• Dilemmas of assessment and documentation

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• Participation by children

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• Involvement of parents

This timely book will be appealing for those studying in the field of early childhood education, teacher education, special education, general education, social work, counselling, psychology, sociology, childhood studies, and family studies.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781315818504-1

The following story presents an everyday example of the whole of the documentation concerning an individual child in contemporary early childhood education (ECE).

First, the parents fill in an application, consisting of inquiries about the child and the family, to get their child admitted to ECE. Before the child starts her or his early education, the teacher pays a visit to the home to get to know the child and the family, and to learn about the parents' expectations. The teacher uses a locally designed form to structure the discussion and to document it. After the child has started her or his ECE, the teacher and the parent(s) jointly draft an individual educational plan (IEP) for the child on a specific form. The child might be involved in this for a short period. The plan is then followed once or twice a year by using the same form. Additionally, the child's learning, interests and activities are documented in a portfolio. The portfolio is introduced to the parents and they are also encouraged to record their observations in it. Moreover, it is increasingly common that the staff maintain contact with the parents via e-mail. E-mail is used to inform the parents about the activities arranged by the institution and to report to them regarding the behaviour and progress of their child. Additionally, the staff builds a portfolio of the activities of the whole child group, either as hard copy or in digital form. The practitioners also register the number of hours per day that the child attends ECE in a computerized system. If the child moves to another group of children, a meeting is held between the family and the staff members of the old and the new groups. This meeting is also documented. Finally, specific screening methods are used to assess the child's development and school readiness at specific ages.

The above story is composed from an interview with an ECE official in a Finnish town. It depicts the documentation practices that are routinely used with every child in the local ECE centres. Even though the story is from a specific context, it exemplifies a more general trend in early childhood education: various documentation and registering practices have become an integral part of its daily life (cf. Jensen, Broström & Hansen, 2010).

The story also reveals that child documentation seems to serve different functions in ECE and it is only rarely explicitly linked with the other main topic in this book: child assessment. In the story, the tools that are used to examine the child's development at specific ages are the only documentation that is talked about as assessment. Otherwise, the documentation seems to have other functions. Some documentation is used mainly for the sake of administration, like the application form and the registration of the hours during which the child attends ECE. More often, documentation seems to deal with the particular early education centre and the specific group of children. As seen in the above example, it is used to record and provide information on their activities through the creation of a group portfolio and via e-mail exchanges with parents. Documentation is also important in evaluating and planning the educational work and other activities of the institution and in showing accountability. Finally, child documentation is done for the sake of individual children and families. It is used to support the children's development and learning, and their participation in ECE, as well as parental involvement in early education. These more generic motivations for child documentation derive usually from the aims to enhance the quality of ECE, both through its pedagogical work and through collaboration with parents (see OECD, 2006). Additionally, child documentation can be seen as a means to provide individualized and child-centred early education (Carr & Lee, 2012; Driscoll & Rudge, 2005).

In this book we are interested in the child documentation, the impetus of which is connected to the pedagogical work of ECE, to the learning, development and participation of children, and to collaboration with parents. We discuss practices such as pedagogical documentation, learning stories, individual educational and developmental plans (IEPs and IDPs), portfolios, and standardized measures, along with forms and questionnaires aimed at parents and children. Often these documentation tools are labelled and seen as something other than assessment. However, we argue that much of the child documentation that takes place on a regular basis in ECE is intertwined with assessment, even though this may not be its primary aim. Hence, we do not take the specific theoretical backgrounds of different documentation practices as our starting points but adopt a more critical stance. We consider, on the one hand, how children are assessed and documented and, on the other hand, how they are documented and assessed though different documentation practices in ECE. We also take into account children's participation in documentation and the involvement of parents. Consequently, we discuss child documentation as a boundary object regarding the teacher, parent and the child (or regarding the institution and the home). Drawing on our studies in the Nordic context, we analyse and give examples of what forms of documentation are used in ECE and how documentation is deployed in practice. We also study the functions of documentation and how it governs the gaze on children and childhood as well as on parents, parenthood and professionals, and on ECE as an institution in contemporary society. We do not present ideas or models of ‘good’ documentation, but we hope to participate in the development of ECE by providing a thought-provoking discussion on assessment and documentation and their dilemmas.

Assessment in the Nordic ECE

Historically, documenting and observing children in ECE is not new. For example, Lenz-Taguchi (2000) argues that child observation and documentation have been conducted in Swedish early education throughout the twentieth century for various purposes, starting from medically-focused forms of documentation in the early twentieth century, developing later into psychologically-oriented observation and documentation. She notes that the decentralization of the steering system of ECE services — a phenomenon that is recognizable in different forms from the 1980s onwards in the welfare services of many countries — led to an increased interest in observation and documentation in the 1990s.

However, documentation is not usually associated with assessment in Nordic ECE — something that was also exemplified in the story in the beginning of this chapter. Overall, assessment is a culturally contradictory issue in Nordic ECE. Traditionally, the whole of the child's care, education and instruction — ‘educare thinking’ — has been at the core of the ECE ideologies, along with the child's social development, play and peer relations. Formal lessons and learning are seen as the domain of compulsory education (Lidholt, 2001; Niikko, 2006; Wagner, 2006). For instance, Finnish preschool — that is, early education provided for all six-year-olds during the year preceding compulsory education — does not aim to teach children to read. Instead, learning to read and write is defined as the goal of the first grade at school. Formal lessons and school-type education are not understood as belonging to a good childhood. This aligns with the thinking in other Nordic countries too (Wagner, 2006). As a result, assessment is usually not regarded as a part of ECE. Even though documentation can be underlined in the institutions (e.g. Lpfö98, 2010) and explicit assessment tools seem to be more common, assessment as an activity and task is still seen mainly as something that early educators in the Nordic ECE do not engage in, but rather something that the children will encounter when in school.

Furthermore, it seems that what is meant by assessment is ambiguous. In present-day literature, it may mean to evaluate or analyse something, to estimate, to give a review, assess or rate someone or something (Vallberg-Roth, 2012b). Sometimes assessment is used as a synonym for, or mixed with, the concept of evaluation. In this book we differentiate between these two concepts. We apply assessment when discussing an examination focusing on the individual, group or activity level. By evaluation we refer to an analysis at the institutional, system and programme level (cf. Sheridan, 2009). Considering the aims of the book, our discussion focuses mainly on assessment.

Our starting point is that assessment is, if not explicitly, implicitly part of ECE, and we will present examples about how it is intertwined in many of its ordinary documentation practices. Moreover, it is important to take into account that documentation and the assessment entangled with it does not only refer to written words, per se, but incorporates typically both written materials and talk (cf. Putnam & Cooren, 2004). Documentation can register assessments that are based on, or made in, talk and interaction. It can also be used as an invitation to assessment or to such talk that allows assessment in different social practices, for example, in parent-teacher discussions (Alasuutari & Markström, 2011; Markström, 2011a). These different practices of documentation and assessment are also illuminated in this book. Some chapters will consider assessment by studying mainly documentation — that is, written materials — but in some chapters the focus is on assessment as it is talked about or as it occurs in the intertwinement of written material and talk.

In this book we do not aim at promoting or suppressing any singular form of documentation or assessment, for example, on specific pedagogical grounds. Instead, we consider assessment and documentation from various perspectives that all entail a critical stance to the benevolent functions that they are primarily considered (only) to have. Principally, we draw on recent discussions on ‘documentality’ (Ferraris, 2013), but also the literature that considers the role and agency of documents and ‘matter’, or other objects in social life that have inspired us (e.g. Barad, 2007; Latour, 2005; Prior, 2003). Furthermore, the approach of governance (e.g. Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 1996b), which can be linked with documentality, provides an important starting point to some sections of the book.

‘Documentality’, documentation and agency

In social research as well as in contemporary life, documents are mainly seen as sources of evidence and receptacles of inert content. This implies an understanding of documents as (neutral) artefacts, exterior to the social interaction and its agents (Prior, 2003, 2008). Recently, this assumption has been challenged, especially, in the theory of ‘documentality’ and in literature drawing on Action Network Theory and posthumanist performativity. All these approaches provide bases for arguing for the agency of documents; even though they differ from each other, for example, in their notions of the human/subject and the nonhuman/object, as will be shown below.

‘Documentality’ is a concept introduced by Maurizio Ferraris (2013) and the name of his philosophical theory that presents a model of the social world. The basic argument of the theory is that social objects like money, marriages, childhood, students, education, bets, promises, assessments, the price of oil, taxes, parliaments and weekdays are the result of inscriptions or ‘traces’ of acts on some medium, for example on paper, in a computer file or in people's heads. Even though Ferraris takes a realistic stance to natural objects and sees them as existing in space and time independently of subjects, he argues that social objects are constructed, and that this is done specifically by inscription. According to him, ‘there is nothing social outside the text’ (ibid., p. 318). The text produces all that is social to us. However, the text needs to be understood broadly. It does not only refer to writing but also to communicating and using symbols more generally as well as to mental traces. Additionally, social objects always involve at least two persons.

Let's take an imaginary example from ECE. If a teacher, while observing a child, makes a mental note on some specific behaviour of the child, she produces an inscription. If the teacher never shares the mental note with anybody it cannot be called a social object in Ferraris' thinking. However, as soon as the teacher starts to discuss the observation with a colleague or any other person, or when she registers it on some medium, say, in the child's portfolio, a social object is constructed. Depending on the context, the object can be called, for example, a concern, an assessment, a problem child, a humorous story or information.

Hence, for the starting point of this book, Ferraris (2013) gives us the idea that not just face-to-face communication, but all kinds of registerings and documentations in ECE are essential in constructing the social world of the institution and the social objects of which this world comprises. Documentation is not something extra to the social life of ECE, but rather a fundamental part of it.

Ferraris (2013, pp. 247–96) also presents interesting arguments regarding institutions and documentation. He argues that institutions are specializations of social reality, and that they follow the same rules in their existence as social reality: institutional objects and institutions are constructed by documents. He also reserves the term ‘document’ only for inscriptions that have institutional value. Documents can be divided into two categories: weak and strong documents. Weak documents include merely the registration of facts (or issues). Strong documents, by contrast, are performatives. They are inscriptions of an act or an attestation that endures in time and has social value. For example, a university certificate changes a student to an MA, and this qualification stays with her. However, no document is weak or strong in itself but its character depends on the context. (The university certificate does not help if the student needs to prove her identity when entering a foreign country.) A strong document can become a weak one over time, and a weak document can be applied as a strong one in some context. For example, a memo of a child observation can be categorized as a weak document if it does not prescribe or cause any action. Nonetheless, if the memo is later used as evidence about the child's abilities and skills when assessing her development, for instance in a parent-teacher meeting, it turns into a strong document.

Ferraris (2013) distinguishes between subjects that have representations and objects that do not have them, but this division should not be understood as a foundational categorical difference. Instead, human beings are also social objects. Besides, while social objects depend on subjects — they would not exist if there were no subjects who could recognize them — they are not subjective. Ferraris also argues for privileging objects relative to subjects. According to him, ‘what matters most are the objects that are in the world’ (ibid., p. 13). Even though he does not use the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I A view on curricula, didaktik and teachers
• PART II Auditing the child
• PART III Focus on parenthood
• PART IV Conclusion
• Appendix: Notes on the data examples
• References
• Index