Chapter 6: Observation and Assessment
Overview
As an early childhood educator, you provide young children with a safe, nurturing, culturally responsive learning environment that supports individual learning needs. A key part of supporting individual learning needs includes developing skills in observation, documentation, and providing assessments. This allows you to tailor classroom activities and individual learning to the needs of the children in your classroom. Learning to conduct observations, documentation, and assessments in everyday teaching practices is vital to creating and maintaining an effective learning environment. By mastering these skills, you become capable of tailoring your teaching methods to the unique needs of each child. Chapter 6 will delve into the skills necessary for observation, documentation, and assessment as you plan individualized and group curricula.
Objectives
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
- Describe how the approach to child assessment has changed over time.
- Define assessment and observation.
- Explain the differences, similarities, and relationships between observation and assessment.
- Discriminate between the types of assessment.
- Describe the cycle of observation, including the iterative nature of this process.
- Describe how the educator becomes a critical component of observation.
- Describe various methods of recording observation.
- Explain how the data collected during observation and documentation is used in planning curriculum and responding to children in the classroom.
Key Terms
- Anecdotal record
- Assessment
- Authentic assessment
- Checklist
- Documentation
- Formal assessment
- Formative assessment
- Informal assessment
- Iterative
- Naturalistic observation
- Norm-referenced
- Objective
- Observation
- Portfolio
- Rating scale
- Running record
- Standardized
- Subjective
- Summative assessment
- Work sample
Attributions
- Chapter opening image: Untitled by Hallie Easley is released under CC BY 4.0
