Wednesday Words
We will look at the words that define us.
In the last Wednesday Words post we looked at what “informal assessments” are and how we use them in an early childhood classroom. Today we are looking at formal assessments. May is a great time to review the meaning of formal assessments since this is the time frame where many elementary schools around the country are gearing up for the high stakes testing season (I feel like retailers are missing out on putting on a sale here. I mean they use every other event for a big sale weekend why not put one on during testing season?).
Formal assessments are any assessment where you are scoring the test based on a standard. This compares how well the child is performing compared to their peers. These are not normally used with young children within an early childhood setting. There are many reasons for this testing type should be avoided for young children. First off they cannot yet read, or read well enough, to complete an assessment of this nature. There is also the limited attention span of young children to consider. Yet another mark against formal assessment measures is the vast differences in development that young children exhibit. There is a large window of opportunity for a young child to master a skill so it wouldn’t make much sense to assess whether they have learned something at a given point. We will talk more about this window of development later.
A small disclaimer here. There will be some performance based assessments that you will see used with young children that are scored against the average performance of other children the same age. These are normally used by psychologists or other professionals, not within a classroom setting.