Why did you say you felt frightened by the loud part of the music?
- Ethical practices
- Fidelity between assessment practices and their intended uses
- Age, developmental, and cultural appropriateness
- Reliable and valid methods and instruments
- Alignment with desired outcomes that are educationally significant
- Application of results that improves learning and outcomes for children
- Concrete evidence collected in real-world contexts
- Conclusions based on multiple sources of evidence gathered over time
- Follow-through as needed to provide referrals or other needed services
- Limited use of standardized tests
- Collaboration between teachers, programs, and families
These principles make sense because they focus on acquiring information that is used to improve teaching and learning and identify children who may need interventions. Practices consistent with these principles promote access to services, efficient use of resources, and confidence in determinations and decisions made on behalf of young children. NAEYC and NAECS/SDE assessment guidelines are based on professional standards established by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Center for Measurement in Education (NAEYC/NAECS/SDE, 2003).
The Importance of Objectivity
Critical to the use of any assessment strategy or method is objectivity. Teachers must learn to separate the accounting of what they observe or measure in children from interpretation, which should be done separately in the context of analyzing multiple sources of data (Jablon, Dombro & Dichtelmiller, 2007). In other words, teachers strive to separate facts from opinions.
Consider the two sample anecdotal entries below recorded by a teacher of a 4-year-old class:
- Jamison stepped on a line of blocks that Camden was arranging on the floor in the block area. Camden looked at Jamison and said, “Stop it, you are wrecking my road.” Jamison stepped on the blocks again and then kicked two of them out of the line. Camden started to cry and Jamison said, “You are just a big baby, I don’t want to play with you anyways.” Jamison backed away from the block center and stood off to the side with his fists clenched and tears in his eyes as Anya came and sat down next to Camden.
- Camden wanted to work alone and was minding his own business arranging blocks in a line to make a road; Jamison intruded and stepped on them. Camden felt frustrated and when he said “Stop it, you are wrecking my road,” Jamison kicked the blocks and in typically mean fashion said, “You are just a big baby, I don’t want to play with you anyways.” Anya came over to make Camden feel better and Jamison just sulked and pouted over in the corner.
The first record preserves the events as they occurred with matter-of-fact language, while the second clearly assigns protagonist/antagonist roles to Jamison and Camden and assumes motivations for the behavior that occurred for all three children. The first note, compared with other narratives, can be analyzed for behavior trends over time for any of the children. Perhaps this episode is consistent with a pattern of aggressive (Jamison) or passive (Camden) or empathetic (Anya) behaviors, but it could just as easily represent a departure from any of the children’s usual interactions. The second entry clearly indicates that the teacher has already made a judgment about each of the children, and its usefulness for gleaning insights is limited.
Similarly, suppose four times a year a teacher conducted a fine motor assessment by asking each child to cut out a paper circle with scissors. Table 12.2 displays two records of this task on separate occasions as it might be recorded by different teachers.