Think of a lesson plan from your licensure area. Knowing that assessment is an integral part of teaching, explain at least four informal and formal assessments that you will use in your lesson plan to provide you with feedback and involve the students in assessing their own learning.
In an early childhood classroom, assessment is used day in and day out on a continuous basis. The large portion of assessments done in an early childhood classroom are informal assessments; teachers are continually assessing their children on an informal level in order to gain information about their abilities and struggles. The method I would most commonly use with my children would be observation. In order to determine "where children are" I will have to continually observe their different behaviors in order to provide them more or less support in a particular area. Observation could either be done formally or informally; either very in depth and looking for particular clues to a certain behavior, or it can be done while children are playing together in the block area. Another great informal assessment tool to use in an early childhood classroom is developing some sort of checklist. While it may not tell you everything you should know about a certain subject, such as getting to know one-to-one correspondence, it will still give you a general idea of how the children understand the topic. Discussion during group time or lunch is another way to assess children on an informal level. The teacher can learn a lot about her students through their responses to a story, through a word game, or even through a large group activity such as making a web. These types of assessments will take up the majority of all assessments in an early childhood classroom. While there are not formal pencil-paper assessments per se, there are still several ways an early childhood teacher can assess her children.
On the formal level, paper-pencil assessments would not be sufficient in providing information about what children know in Pre-K. The most sufficient strategy would be to assess children using performance assessment. If I were doing a lesson on a book study, I may assess what the children have learned about the book after reading. Each child could take a turn telling something they noticed or remembered from the story. In another lesson about the same book, the children could produce their own book based on what they have learned about books (does it have a beginning, middle, and end? Illustrations?). Through dramatic play, I may learn the concepts the children have grasped from the story by the way they are playing with materials, using costumes, and interacting through dialogue. Some sort of final assessment of the entire lesson may be revisiting what the children know about the story or just books in general, and compare that to their knowledge prior to the lesson.
Consider norm referenced assessment and criterion referenced assessment. Are there advantages to both? Are their disadvantages?
I can see that there are advantages to both types of assessments and there are also disadvantages. One advantage of criterion referenced assessment is the ability to get precise results that tell what a student does not know concerning the topic. On a science test covering the components of plant and animal cells, it is assumed that from lessons the students have learned the material, and based on the test, the teacher can determine which students have failed to learn the material. This type of assessment determines whether or not students have learned curriculum material. A disadvantage to this could be that, as the teacher, I assume that since the student got a question wrong then he/she does not know the material; however, there could be other factors that play in to why the student got the question wrong, and possibly later (after tests are handed back out) I may notice the students disappointment in not paying attention to the question or some other factor that cause him/her to answer wrong.
In regards to norm-referenced assessment, one advantage of this type of assessment may be that scoring in an average or high percentile when compared to other students may mean that the student has a good general knowledge of concepts. While it is great to know how one ranks among other students their age, it is not a good measure of what children know. Many norm-referenced assessments do not focus on topics students are currently studying or have recently studied. They focus more on what all students at a certain age should know and should have learned in all their years of education. This method is useful when applying for college or graduates programs and for assessment over an entire school year, but in other terms, I do not find it to have great advantages. One of the greatest disadvantages I see is the stigma scoring in a certain percentile may put on a student. If a student has taken many norm-referenced assessments and continually scores in the lowest percentile (even though he may be very smart) could diminish his self-esteem and outlook towards school. I would prefer to use criterion referenced assessments in my classroom, and I know that it will not be possible to avoid norm-referenced assessments because these assessments are used on almost every grade level.
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