Assessment

When considering the development of a child, regardless of age, there are a set of domains that educators and psychologists assess. Usually, these domains include cognitive development, social development, language development, and motor— both fine and gross— development. Of course, some of these domains are relatively specific to age or child (i.e, most educators are not concerned with attempting to refine an eighteen year old’s gross motor skills). So, a common inquiry has been often seen on the news: How can we properly assess our children?

Whenever one watches the news on television or read an editorial, the media often agrees that students need a new way of being assessed and that our traditional standardized testing is neither appropriate to determine the growth of a child or to hold educators accountable. However, these sources are only referring to the academic growth of children. What these sources tend to forget is the various realms of development that we study in this classroom and the interactions these domains have.

So, the question comes to be: How do we not only appropriately assess the academic progression of children, but how to do assure that children are meeting their developmental milestones? In order to consider how to appropriately measure a child’s development in these domains, I think it’s important to consider the gamut of child development charts that our community of early childhood educators have the opportunity to work with. When looking at these developmental milestones, it’s clearly evident to trained professionals that this is not a list of achievements or a checklist of goals for every child to obtain; instead, these milestones act as a roadmap for parents to assess if a child is developing at an appropriate rate.

I do believe that it is important to assess children’s academic progression in school. Our current standardized exams do attempt to accomplish this (although in a suboptimal way). Although I do agree with the many sources that an additional means of accountability should be in place to examine the academic growth of children, I’m unsure of what method would be the most efficient to do this. However, I do not believe that the other domains need to be assessed in a new fashion. RTI and similar systems effectively examine children in relationship to an averagely developing peer and offers scaffolding for children who require it. Since it has been successful in this task, I do not believe we need a different system in place.

In order to look for ways to assess children, it's reasonable to examine the standardized testing that other countries use. One of the leaders in education (and thus one of the logical sources to examine) is Japan. Japan uses a single standardized test in order to gauge its students' growths, and this test is only taken once (at the end of secondary school). Therefore, much of Japan's efforts in education go towards the practice of standardized testing (and evident from their consistently high scores in international tests like TIMMS). This system does have some keys flaws, though. By emphasizing standardized testing so much, Japanese students tend to have weaker problem solving skills and critical thinking skills; in addition, students tend to have much less independent thought.

Through my readings, it's clear that all countries agree that standardized testing needs to be refined, but no one country has found an optimal solution.