Ways of assessing children and curriculum: stories of early childhood practice

Abstract

This text is a response to the increasingly widespread practice of administering standardised tests to pre-school and primary-grade children. As Celia Genishi points out, such traditional tests are often misused and fail to measure many significant aspects of children's growth and learning. Here she and her colleagues present teachers' alternative ways of meeting the need for the assessment of young children. Ways of Assessing Children and Curriculum: Stories of Early Childhood Practice is the result of a collaboration between early childhood teachers and teacher educators. The stories in the central chapters provide a look at the ways these teachers document the development of children from diverse cultural backgrounds in varied contexts, including play-oriented, bilingual and Foxfire classrooms. The alternative ways of assessing, some traditional and some novel, include observing, note-taking, role-playing and keeping portfolios of children's work over time. They are developmentally based and have grown out of curricula co-constructed by these teachers and their children, in contrast to standardised measures designed by outsiders to evaluate groups statistically. This book should be a valuable resource for all teachers, teacher educators and upper-level students in early childhood education and child development. It should also be of interest to school district administrators and policymakers.