Assessment of Young Children

A Collaborative Approach

Lisa B. Fiore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293913
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

In an era where assessment mandates tend to minimize or dismiss individual differences and creativity, resulting in punitive outcomes or inertia, this essential guide provides teachers with a collaborative approach to assessment that emphasizes the importance of bringing children and families into the process.

Now in its second edition, Assessment of Young Children explores both standardized and authentic assessment, work sampling systems, and observation skills. Fully updated with current standards and research, this new edition also features an enhanced focus on trauma-informed practices, culturally and linguistically diverse learners, and family involvement. Lively and engaging, chapters help readers cultivate developmentally appropriate practice, create appropriate expectations, examine and celebrate children's work, interact in groups, and improve their reflective teaching. Accounts of real experiences from children, families, teachers, and administrators provide on-the-ground models of assessment strategies and demonstrate how children are affected.

Exploring a variety of ways to observe and assess young children in their natural environments, this critical volume encourages an assessment strategy where the child remains the focus and collaboration with children, families, and colleagues creates an image – not a diagnosis – of the child that is empowering rather than constraining.

1

What Do You Notice?

When asked in an interview, ‘How can we get back to schools which are places you go to learn?’ Edgar Morin replied simply, ‘With love. And it is not my idea, I am simply quoting Plato.’ More than anything else children ask for attention and love.

(Vecchi, 2010, p. 27)

In an education climate continuously marked by high-stakes testing, punitive measures for teachers and schools, and policies that sound and feel competitive by nature, after reading the above quote you may find yourself asking, “What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner asked the same question in her 1984 hit song by the same name, and it boils down to a simple concept – relationships. These relationships include the relationships between and among children, teachers, families, community members, and government influence. Love is more or less visible in different, specific situations and examples, as assessment of young children contributes to the collective weaving of our nation’s educational fabric.

Most early childhood teachers become teachers because of a fundamental love of learning and joy in sharing that passion with young children and like-minded colleagues. In terms of public education of our country’s youngest citizens, the highest quality of human interaction in an early childhood classroom setting should be expected as a fundamental right on par with other rights outlined in our government structure – the right to free speech, religious practice, and interstate travel. Sounds simple. Yet you may have noticed that education today is anything but simple. Young children are impacted daily by teachers who are asked to adhere to curriculum that is influenced by local, national, and global political and sociocultural forces that greatly influence standards, expectations, and the image of children in the United States. Many experts are quick to connect a society’s economic future with success and accountability in schools (Patrinos, 2016), but to do so “while ignoring the connection between our schools and the daily lives of people living in poverty is fundamentally dishonest” (Coleman-Kiner, 2011, p. 25). Somewhere along the accountability pathway, love often takes a backseat to outcomes and benchmarks, leaving pre-service teachers, novice teachers, and veterans alike to wonder, “How did we get here?”

A Closer Look at Accountability

Identity and assessment are at the heart of the issue and related confusion about accountability. It will be helpful to gain a sense of the current educational landscape before we begin to address assessment, specifically. First, demographics in the United States suggest that a hypothetical classroom population includes students possessing the following qualities:

• 7 out of 30 live in poverty;
• 11 out of 30 are non-white;
• 6 out of 30 do not speak English as a first language;
• 6 out of 30 are not reared by their biological parents;
• 1 out of 30 are experiencing homelessness;
• 6 out of 30 are victims of abuse.

(Sultan, 2015)

American public schools continue to be caught in a societal knot as educators and legislators grapple with the role of education. This is not a new knot – indeed our country has been struggling with the role of education for decades. I recently picked up my yellowed copy of Radical School Reform (Gross & Gross, 1969) and re-read the editors’ introduction. The editors contextualize the critics’ critiques of schools, stating, “What they find in the classroom is suppression, irrelevance, inhumanity, manipulation, and the systematic stultification of most of what is promising in children and youth” (p. 17).

Over fifty years later, Diane Ravitch writes of her involvement in the school reform efforts of the 1990s and early 2000s, in The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2016), stating her concern:

that accountability, now a shibboleth that everyone applauds, had become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education. Testing, I realized with dismay, had become a central preoccupation in the schools and was not just a measure but an end in itself … [Accountability] was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools as states and districts strived to meet unrealistic targets.

(p. 14)

So what is a realistic target for children, families, educators, and policymakers to aim for and agree upon? “It is almost as if we are afraid to say that our work is a purely human endeavor – that our jobs are to develop human beings” (Coleman-Kiner, 2011, p. 25). Young children are born citizens, and will be the citizens of the future who will determine the solvency of our nation. Is the role of education to transmit culture or to construct culture? Depending on the stance taken, accountability drives assessment that looks and feels quite different from the perspective of children, families, teachers, and policymakers.

Some argue that schools are places to transmit culture, with particular effort made to close sociocultural gaps that lead to academic inequities (García & Weiss, 2017). These cultural gaps (e.g., achievement gap, school-readiness gap) are typically linked to socio-economic gaps, namely poverty, and the benefits of quality early childhood programs are targeted at reducing our country’s high dropout rate. Yet an emphasis on school reform rather than increased, pervasive social services tends to dominate mainstream media attention.

Maintaining the cultural transmission stance often means that schools are places where teachers are responsible for preserving culture, transmitted through standards-based curriculum and monitored using traditional assessment. “Despite countless declarations that education is the civil rights issue of our time, past practices have made little progress in reducing education opportunity and achievement gaps that help perpetuate social inequality” (Darling-Hammond & Oakes, 2019, p. 263), and the U.S. education system clearly will not be able to compete on a global scale. If public education is the responsibility of American citizens, then accountability viewed through this lens fuels the competitive fire that drives many politicians and public policy in the cultural transmission stance.

Others posit that schools are places where culture is constantly renewed and reconstructed by those who participate in the classrooms. Dewey (1916) believed that learning is an inherent part of the teaching process, and more recent scholarship supports the notion of accountability as a multifaceted construct, rather than a one-dimensional, unidirectional goal (Krechevsky, Rivard, & Burton, 2010). In 2015, the National Policy Board for Educational Administration developed a guide describing the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) – ten standards illustrated in Figure 1.1. These standards evolved from previous standards and reflect collaboration among professional organizations whose members “recognize the central importance of human relationships not only in leadership work but in teaching and student learning” (p. 3). Maintaining this stance means that schools are places where

Figure 1.1 Professional Standards for Educational Leaders

Adapted from National Policy Board for Educational Administration, 2015. www.npbea.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Professional-Standards-for-Educational-Leaders_2015.pdf.

[l]earning and knowledge are therefore made possible … by the interaction between individuals who are building knowledge along with others, and their physical and cultural environment. The individual and the context thus take on substance. They define each other and give each other identity.

(Strozzi, 2001, p. 58)

Assessment and accountability in this vein are multi-dimensional, incorporating multiple perspectives and media to demonstrate the learning that occurs within a particular context.

A Closer Look at Assessment

The attempt to strike a delicate balance, between cultural transmission and construction, is perhaps experienced most acutely by teachers. Teachers frequently grapple with a tension between pedagogy that is thoughtfully designed according to a set of values and beliefs about what is appropriate for young children, and policies that demand specific academic results according to measures that teachers don’t necessarily perceive as valid indicators of children’s abilities. I frequently hear student teachers, in the midst of their student teaching placements, complaining that the idealism with which they entered their placement settings (e.g., hopes and passion for children’s and their own learning) is being challenged by the realities of classroom demands (e.g., “canned” curriculum, excessive requirements). Although teaching and assessment are inextricably linked, teaching and testing are often hard to reconcile.

“Assessment” and “testing” have become synonymous terms, when in fact their meanings, applications, and implications are quite distinct. Although there are many different definitions of assessment and testing, some distinguishing features include the following:

• Assessment is often a process that includes information gained from many different childhood experiences and activities, while testing is typically limited to a particular instrument with a specific goal.
• Assessment often includes input from multiple sources and collaborators, such as parents and guardians, administrators, service providers, advocates, and legislators, while testing is typically limited to information contributed by the individual test-taker without any requisite feedback once the test is completed.
• Assessment may occur in formal and informal settings, using various techniques, while testing requires specific, explicit directions to be followed in order to believe that the data is scientifically sound.
• Assessment framed in terms of evaluation and understanding often feels better to early childhood professionals than testing that is linked to numerical scores (and related anxiety and job security) and more structured class time.

For the purposes of dialogue generated from the reading of this book, the ideal early childhood assessment is a process that includes and/or results in products that inform decisions made about children and curriculum. The process is informed by others and is rooted in developmentally appropriate activities for children ages 2–8.

In current early childhood classrooms, ideal assessment is designed to acquire information that will help responsible individuals make decisions in the interest of a child’s growth and development. Testing as part of such assessment takes time and resources, and a larger number of children in a particular class means more time and resources required to administer and evaluate the testing. This mandatory time either reduces classroom time for free play and exploration or must be carved out of other organized periods of the day, such as recess, lunchtime, or “specials” (art, music, library). The assessment process is further challenging because teachers recognize that one particular test or score does not paint a full, clear picture of a complex, developing child. This is supported by research that states that standardized testing of children under the age of 8 is scientifically invalid and contributes to detrimental labeling that can permanently damage a child’s educational future (Miller & Almon, 2009). Yet the pressures to incorporate more assessment into an increasingly academics-focused day continue.

Effects of Accountability and Assessment

The ripple effects of school, state, and national pressures can be felt at every level of the education system, from early childhood education through higher education and the accompanying administrative offices. Currently, and for reasons that will be articulated in Chapter 5, a public school district is held accountable for students’ progress as evidenced by the scores produced by students in its schools. Likewise, a teacher education program that claims to educate early childhood teachers may be held accountable if graduates can’t demonstrate that their students are meeting standards required by the town, state, or United States. The cycle of accountability indeed captures all levels of education, yet we must be careful that the responsibility with which we imbue teachers is reasonable and ethical. Recent reports posing allegations against Superintendent Beverly Hall in the Atlanta, GA school district (see Maxwell, 2018) describe a culture of fear and pressure that can prompt well-intentioned citizens to question and suspend ethics, and the extreme lengths that educators may go to convince others that achievement is possible, despite demographic odds (e.g., race, financial security).

Attempts to diminish the perceived weight of standardized assessments have evolved in recent years, yet standardized measures are being required of children in younger grades, such as preschool. Alternative assessments, such as “performance-based assessment,” grew out of a desire by many educators to offer measurable hands-on tasks that differ from traditional standardized tests. In early childhood classrooms, examples of children’s work demonstrate knowledge and understanding through application:

• drawing a picture of an American scientist on a self-designed postage stamp;
• writing a haiku poem about your family;
• acting out a scene from a story;
• composing a song about caterpillars.

In the higher education arena, however, performance-based assessment is two-tiered. It is conducted by gathering samples of the teacher candidates’ work, and also of their students’ work in a classroom setting. The ide...