Assessment in Early Childhood Essay

According to Ann Landers, it is not what you do for your barbarianren, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. The subject of minorrens op successiontion and performance in school, and even before school, has received increasing mankind attention during the latter 1980s and early 1990s. Over the years educators has search various methods of assessment to value students. According to Pett, (1990), educators riding habit the term regular(a) Assessment to define the practice of realistic student involvement in evaluation of their induce achievement.One method of Authentic Assessment is to garner and review a portfolio of the childs practice. Venn, (2000), stated that portfolio is a dictatorial collection of students ca-ca and related materials that depicts a students activities, proceeding and achievement in one or more areas of the curriculum. In this era performance assessment related to the monitoring of students m astery of a shopping center curriculum, portfolios raft enhance the assessment process by revealing a range of skills and understandings of young children in Early Childhood Education.The wide use of portfolio flush toilet stimulate a shift in classroom practices and tuition polices. According to Meisels and Steele (1991), portfolios enable children to participate in assessing their own work, keep continue of individual childrens progress and provide a basis for evaluating the theatrical role of individual childrens over whole performance. There are many benefits of victimisation portfolios in the early childhood classroom. Portfolio assessment has become widely utilize in educational settings as a way to examine and survey childrens progress, by documenting the process of learning or changes as it occurs.For illustration if parents feel the need to evaluate their childs progress in the classroom the portfolio will be available for this purpose. Hence, with the aid of the instructor and deduction of their childs 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 insert into the learning process and acquaints depth in their work. According to Murphy and metalworker (1990), portfolios can be in tilted to motivate students and promote learning finished reflection and self-assessment.Involving students in appointing their own pieces which are done without pressure and while 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 distinguish his favourite piece and tell why he choose that have of work.On-going feedback is another benefit that po rtfolio provides. In the early childhood classroom portfolio contains a wide variety of work samples, including successive drafts of work on detail projects/theme in the curriculum. Hence, while evaluating students progress, teachers would be able to conclusions about a childs abilities, achievement, weaknesses, strengths and needs. The conclusion will be based on the childs development, documentations made in the portfolio and on the teachers knowledge of curriculum and stages of development.Finally, when the evaluation progress is complete 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 engage 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 te nd to complete more hands-on and concrete work at this stage.The facilitator whitethorn take a photograph of a childs completed block structure during the first, second or third semester of the year to show the childs progress in development. Many teachers use portfolios to evaluate how a student progresses over an extended period of time. The portfolio normally contains the exceed 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 unionised 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(prenominal) as cognitive, gross motor, fine motor and so forth. Once the portfolio is organized, the teacher can evaluate the childs achievements. Appropriate evaluation should ever so be done by the teache r in regards to the comparison of the childs current work to his or her previous work. When the teacher is evaluating, he or she will be able to draw conclusions about a childs abilities, achievement, weaknesses, strengths and needs.The conclusion will be based on the childs development, documentations made in the portfolio and on the teachers 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.