Assessing Young Children Through the Curriculum: From Standards

Rationale Assessment and Principles of Standards and Summary
Curriculum Planning Assessment Curriculum Mapping
Early Childhood Building Blocks : Assessing Young Children Through the Curriculum: From Standards to Practice
What’s
Inside
early Childhood Building Blocks
Assessing Young Children Through The
CurriCulum: From sTAndArds To PrACTiCe
Victoria Carr
executive director of the Arlitt Child and Family research and education
Center
mary Beth Wright
director of the Arlitt Child and Family research and education Center
inTroduCTion
As educators, we assess children every day. We systematically observe and document
children’s interactions, collect and analyze samples of children’s work to monitor progress,
and ask children questions. We talk to parents to gather information about the development
of their children. We converse with children to learn about their thought processes and
problem-solving abilities. We record children’s learning using checklists, rubrics, photographs,
and audio and video recordings. In addition, we may use commercial tests to measure
children’s achievement against a norm. These are all examples of ways in which we assess
children.
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ATionAle
Assessment can be defined as all the processes used to collect information about a child (Wolery, 1994). The data
collected are organized, interpreted, and used to make decisions about curriculum and instruction. This is
the essential purpose of assessing children in early childhood classrooms: to answer questions and make decisions
about children’s learning and development and to identify ways to help them move forward.
With the current emphasis on standards in early childhood education (see Ohio Early Learning and
Development Standards Birth to Age 5), it is important that the classroom curriculum align with the
standards. Many educators also feel that the standards can and should be a foundational support for
assessing children. The introduction to the Ohio Early Learning and Development Standards (2012) explains
that:
Teachers and others can use the standards as starting
points for observing and understanding young
children’s learning and development. With each
learning encounter teachers observe, they can
refer to the standards and ask what knowledge
and skills are the children gaining in the areas of
language and literacy, cognition and general knowledge,
social and emotional development, physical well-being
and motor development, and approaches toward learning.
Teachers can use their observations of integrated learning
to plan new learning encounters for young children and
support the building of knowledge in all essential
domains of school readiness. (p. 5)
If both the curriculum and assessments are grounded in the standards, the curriculum can be the basis for
monitoring and assessing children’s learning and development.
AssessmenT And CurriCulum PlAnning
Since the curriculum needs to be aligned to the standards and since assessments are aligned to the
curriculum, we know the assessments will be aligned to the standards, too. These assessments must be
sensitive enough to document each child’s progress through the curriculum. Used on an ongoing basis,
through both formal and informal means, aligned assessments create a more complete picture of the child
and the educational process. They also give educators the necessary information to make informed decisions
on how to plan and integrate learning experiences for children.
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As we work to align curriculum to the Ohio Department of Education Early Learning and Development
Standards, we should simultaneously reflect on how we will use this information to guide our assessments of
children. This information may help determine what aspects to observe and document.
In most cases we don’t have just one way or set aside just one time to observe, collect, interpret, and use data.
In reality, teaching is often “messy,” and we simultaneously are instructing, assessing through observation,
and mentally planning how to revise the lesson (curriculum) based on our observations of the children’s
responses. To be effective, we must always be observant, mentally recording and thoughtfully planning for
individual children as well as children in groups.
PrinCiPles oF AssessmenT
Many principles of assessment must be considered when making decisions about children. Due to their
developmental levels, young children do not respond to formal assessment in the same manner as older
children or adults. For this reason, we need to know what developmentally appropriate assessment practices
look like for younger children. Here are seven important guiding principles about the nature of assessment to
think about:
1. Assessment Can Be summative or Formative
There are essentially two types of assessment procedures: summative and formative.
Summative assessment procedures measure the learning that has occurred at a particular time.
Summative assessment tools are typically used for high-stakes testing, special education placement
tests, and kindergarten readiness tests. (See the Building Blocks article “Best Practices in Assessment in
Early Childhood Education,” by Judy Harris Helms.)
Formative assessment procedures are strategies that inform teaching. Formative assessment provides
information to the teacher so that he or she can develop and modify curriculum and learning activities
(Marzano, 2006) to help all children progress. As a result, we create rich learning environments.
The curriculum alignment with the ODE Early Learning and Development Standards will generate
numerous opportunities for formative assessment through observation, project work, anecdotal notes,
checklists, portfolios, and other types of documentation (again, see “Best Practices in Assessment in
Early Childhood Education”). These curricular measures must, however, consider all the principles of
assessment for best practices.
If you want to see what formative assessment can look like, here are links to two examples: The first
shows a teacher conducting a formative assessment through observing and recording, and the second
Early Childhood Building Blocks : Assessing Young Children Through the Curriculum: From Standards to Practice
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shows a teacher assessing a child’s ability to recognize word parts.
2. Assessment should Address Accessibility for All Children
Effective inclusive classroom teachers must also consider how to plan curriculum so that all children
can access the materials and learn the presented concepts, including those children who have
developmental delays or identified disabilities. When universally designed at the onset, adaptations
and modifications to the curriculum for children who have an Individual Education Plan (IEP) or
Individual Family Service Plan (IFSP) will be minimal, thus ensuring that assessment and progress
monitoring are part of the ongoing curricular processes.
3. understanding Child development is Crucial to the Assessment Process
Children are constantly developing and certainly do not reach developmental milestones in a day.
Child development, in all areas, is a process, with key skills or behaviors emerging and expanding
along the way. Consider, for instance, the skill of walking. Children do not wake up one day and learn
to walk. Instead, they have been learning to walk for months, perhaps by pulling themselves up while
holding onto a table, letting go and falling, and then repeating their efforts. Eventually, they take a
few steps while holding the fingers of an adult. The long process of learning to
walk is highlighted on the day when a child is able to take a few steps
without any help, at which point he will begin attempts to move
farther and more quickly.
Just as walking is a continuous process, so are all other areas of child
development. Assessments that are based on development as a
continuum provide important information because they analyze
where a child is functioning within the developmental process. The
focus can then be directed toward experiences that are necessary for
the child to reach future milestones. This is very different from
assessments that compare a child’s skills and behaviors with those
of typically developing peers. Focusing on the deficits of a child
not only is disheartening for
educators, parents, and
children; it also fails to provide
information about how to
support further development.
It is important to understand that children reach developmental milestones at different times. Some
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children begin walking at 12 months, while others may begin at 15 months. This variation is typical
and natural. Cultural differences in child-rearing styles and values may also affect when a child reaches
a certain milestone. For example, in some instances, the mother-child attachment may impede
the development of self-sufficiency skills. Assessments must therefore take natural developmental
variations and child-rearing and cultural differences into consideration.
4. Assessment needs to Consider the interdependent nature of All the
developmental domains
Children are complex beings. They develop physically, cognitively, emotionally, and socially, and all
these developmental domains are interrelated and dependent on the others. For example, a child’s
language development may affect her social development if she is unable to communicate effectively
with other children. Since young children learn through play interactions with their peers, this
child may also show cognitive delays. And so it is impossible to accurately assess one skill or area of
development without also taking into consideration the other areas of development. Thus, it would be
inaccurate for us in the above example to determine that the child was incapable of certain cognitive
tasks without considering the impact of a language barrier on her development. The child might, in
fact, have the cognitive ability to complete the tasks with help provided in the communication area.
5. Assessment must involve Families
Parents should be involved in the assessment process for a host of reasons. First, parents know more
about their children than anyone else. They understand their children’s likes and dislikes and are aware
of their strengths and weaknesses, and they know how to read and respond to their cues. Parents are
also experts about the environment in which their children have grown up and know their children’s
health background. For these reasons, parents can provide professionals with important information
that is impossible to get through other sources. Second, parents see their children in contexts other
than the school environment and view their children from perspectives that differ from those of
professionals.
The ideal is to use a combination of information collected from professionals and parents since
this can lead to a richer, more accurate assessment. And when parents are equal partners in the
assessment process, they may be more likely to be involved in other areas of their children’s education
because they feel that their contributions are important and respected. The more active that parents
are in their children’s education, the greater the developmental progress is for their children. This
should be the goal of all involved.
6. Assessment should utilize natural Contexts
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Context refers to factors such as physical space, materials, activities, people, and structure of the environment.
Research has shown that all these factors can have a powerful impact on the outcomes of assessment
(Bodrova & Leong, 1996). Therefore, if an educator uses only one context to assess children—especially if it
is a context in which the materials are not developmentally appropriate, the people are unfamiliar, or the
environment is chaotic—the results are not going to represent what the child actually knows or is able to
do. Observing children in multiple contexts provides additional information that can then be analyzed and
interpreted to make informed decisions.
Children should be assessed within their natural environment as often as possible. Children feel more
comfortable and at ease in contexts that are familiar to them. Using a natural environment may elicit more
accurate outcomes. Again, families are a great source of information about a child’s skills, behaviors, and
interactions that occur in natural environments, since the home is often the most natural of all contexts.
7. Assessment needs to Be a Collaborative Process
As previously stated, successful assessment requires a team of parents and professionals. The most informed
decisions can be made when each team member’s knowledge and skills can be utilized. Consider the
following questions in building a strong team assessment (Garland, Frank, Buck, and Seklemian, 1992):
• Does the team have a clear philosophy understood by all members?
• Do team members feel a strong sense of loyalty and identity with the team?
• Is each member’s role clearly defined and understood by all, and is each member committed to his
or her role?
• Is there open and honest communication within the team?
• Are the resources of all members recognized and used?
• Is there a process to solve problems and make decisions that is timely, effective, and efficient and
involves all team members?
• Are conflicts or differences openly aired and worked through?
• Do the policies and procedures of the team support the family’s role as team members and decision
makers?
• Does the team regularly evaluate its functioning and set goals in areas of need?
• Does the team have administrative and community support?
8. ongoing Assessment Can inform intervention
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The goal of parents and educators is to support the development of children. If children are assessed
without educators gaining the necessary information to inform instruction, then the development
of children is not truly supported. The assessment is at best arbitrary, or worse, stressful for children
without producing meaningful results. Assessment and intervention should
be interactive processes; therefore, assessment should inform
intervention, and intervention should inform assessment, thus
creating a cycle. This cycle allows educators to analyze which of
their interventions were successful and which were not.
The successful interventions can then be expanded
upon, while the unsuccessful ones can be
modified to support children’s development.
The Head Start National Center on Quality
Teaching and Learning provides an extensive
array of resources for teachers on ongoing
child assessment, which includes videos,
podcasts, tip sheets, and more. There is
information about preparing for assessment,
collecting and synthesizing information,
interpreting information, and strengthening
your program and even an online booklet that will help you choose the best assessments for your program.
sTAndArds And CurriCulum mAPPing
If we are going to document children’s learning, it will be easy to do so using the new Ohio Early Learning
and Development Standards. They begin with the broadest category—domains. There are five of them:
• Social and emotional development
• Physical well-being and motor development
• Approaches toward learning
• Language and literacy development
• Cognition and general knowledge
Within each domain, the standards are organized into strands, or conceptual components. Each strand
contains a topic of focus and the standard statements, or concepts and skills children should know
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within early learning age groups. Each statement includes an example that illustrates how children might
demonstrate competency within that respective strand. This format will help us more easily interpret
documentation for assessment.
More specifically, broad themes within a curriculum can be “mapped” horizontally and vertically to the
standards. We can note within the “map” where the standards could be embedded continuously and
naturally throughout classroom daily routines, centers of interest, and projects. We can specifically design
opportunities where we see holes in the curriculum-standards map. We can also align other content,
specific learning expectations, and assessment strategies. This is a complex but doable strategy for aligning
standards, curriculum, and assessment. It assists teachers in understanding how a sound curriculum based on
best practices in early childhood education embeds the ODE Early Learning and Development Standards into
learning opportunities.
summArY
As we work to align the curriculum to the ODE Early Learning and Development Standards, we need to reflect
on how we will use the information in the standards to guide our assessments of children. To become even
more effective educators, we need to use a system of assessment that is aligned to the curriculum, which in
turn is aligned to the standards. Both formative and summative assessment practices must adhere to guiding
principles that address the developmental and cultural contexts within which a child grows. Remember,
when we use ongoing formal and informal aligned assessments, we can create an informative picture of the
child and his or her needs, which gives us the necessary information to make informed decisions on how to
plan the most effective experiences to meet those needs.
reFerenCes
Bodrova, R., & Leong, D. J. (1996). Tools of the mind: The Vygotskian approach to early childhood education.
Early Childhood Building Blocks : Assessing Young Children Through the Curriculum: From Standards to Practice
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Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Merrill.
Garland, C. W., Frank, A., Buck, D., and Seklemian, P. (1992). Skills inventory for teams. Lightfoot, VA: Child
Development Resources.
Marzano, R. J. (2006). Classroom assessments and grading that work. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision
and Curriculum Development.
Wolery, M. (1994). Assessing children with special needs. In M. Wolery & J. S. Wilbers (Eds.), Including children
with special needs in early childhood programs (71–96). Washington, DC: NAEYC.
ABouT The AuThors
Victoria Carr is the Executive Director for the Arlitt Child and Family Research and Education Center at
the University of Cincinnati and is an associate professor in early childhood education at the University of
Cincinnati. She holds a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and learning and behavioral disorders, a
master’s degree in gifted education, and a doctorate in early childhood special education and has more than
25 years’ experience in Kentucky, Florida, and Ohio as a practitioner and consultant in these fields. Carr has
published and presented papers with regard to nature and children, challenging behaviors, assessment, and
other related topics. She is a coauthor of Challenging Behaviors in Early Childhood Settings: Creating a Place for
All Children and Addressing Challenging Behavior in Early Childhood Settings: A Teacher’s Guide.
Mary Beth Wright is the Director of Children’s Programs at the Arlitt Child and Family Research and Education
Center at the University of Cincinnati. Previous to this, Wright was a lead teacher at the Arlitt Center and
served as the managing editor and head writer of Arlitt Instructional Media, Arlitt’s professional development
initiative. Wright also is an adjunct professor for UC’s early childhood bachelor’s degree programs. She earned
her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Cincinnati.
FoR MoRe InFoRMAtIon
Contact Nancy Brannon at nbrannon@ohiorc.org or
Nicole Luthy at nluthy@ohiorc.org.
Visit http://rec.ohiorc.org to see the REC website.
Also see other Early Childhood Building Blocks.
A CollAboRAtIve PRojeCt oF
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