What is the purpose of assessment in early childhood programs

More often than not, parents and students consider tests and assessments to be synonymous with each other. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. A test provides us information about individual performance through the lens of marks or scores.

On the other hand, an assessment provides distinctive information about what a student knows, the gaps in his/her understanding, and how to possibly cover these gaps.

And for teachers to curate a learning roadmap, it is extremely crucial for learners to go through an assessment at a budding stage. 

Assessment in early childhood education is a comprehensive framework that helps in evaluating a student’s present level of knowledge and skills. This framework benefits the student as the teacher can design a curriculum suited to a learner’s needs and thereafter derive a suitable learning progression.

This can then become a reliable tool for the parents as well, which in turn creates a strong support system for a child’s development, both at school and at home.

Why is it important?

It is universally known that children learn and develop the most between the ages of 3 to 7. Presently, tests are conducted in groups to check a child’s level of knowledge.

Such testing methods seldom provide information about a child’s critical thinking skills and cognitive, social, and emotional dispositions. Early childhood assessment then becomes critical to a child’s overall growth and development.  

Few critical aspects that strengthen the case for Assessment in Early Childhood:

1. It provides a tailor-made comprehensive learning road map instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.
2. It helps recognize the gaps in the learning and development of a child. A customized solution can help plug-in such gaps with relevant support.
3. Assessing a child’s strengths and weak areas helps develop an instructional method more suited to the child. 
4. It provides a feedback mechanism about the child’s learning and development level. It also tells us about the effectiveness of the instructional method.
5. A year-round assessment provides information about whether the learning and instructional targets were met or not.
6. An assessment provides a basis for changing curriculum and instructional design and implementation.

Relying on a comprehensive individualized assessment helps everyone. An educator is aware of what and how to teach. With help of the parent guide and assessments, parents are aware of their child’s needs and can provide relevant support at home. The policymakers can institute changes to the curriculum make-up.

What are the various Assessment methods?

While relying on group-based Standardized Tests is one way that helps us understand a child’s present level of knowledge. Educators can club them with more relevant and comprehensive tools such as:

1. Distractor Analysis

This assessment tool focuses on finding out the causal relationship between the error and its reason. 

Consider a situation: two students A and B, are given the same test to solve. Incidentally, both the students got one question wrong. Under normal circumstances, a teacher will consider both to be at par without going deeper into the performance.

However, distractor analysis helps us in finding out what error type was committed by each student. Assume for a moment that student A made some calculation error; on the other hand, student B misidentified the concept to solve the problem.

Should both students be suggested the same remedy? Of course not!

As a teacher, you might suggest spending more time working on calculations for student A; for student B you might suggest revisiting the relevant concepts. 

2. Unified assessment portfolio 

To evaluate the development level of a child, the educator needs to document assessment results throughout the academic year. This helps in identifying learning outcomes. It also helps in developing instructional methods based on what works and what does not. 

Learn more: NCERT solutions for class 8 maths

3. Using AI-based assessment methods

Our lives-personal and professional- are powered by technology. We are relying more and more on technology to ease our lives. However, early childhood assessment is one area in education that is relatively untouched by technology. 

These days technology fuelled by Artificial Intelligence is the new norm. AI-enabled assessment tools allow for a collated year-on-year progression record. 

This record can be used to create a tailor-made remedial path, once the learning objectives are defined. Second, you, a parent or a teacher, has an overview of the concept progression as the student moves from one grade to the next.

4. Demographic Performance Benchmarking

It is normal practice to benchmark students to the whole class. Doing that provides us limited information though. Demographic Performance Benchmarking provides us with a macro-level assessment of a student’s score.

It factors in the analysis of the score with respect to the total demographic age group of the student. It provides answers to such queries: what is his performance in his respective age group at a national or global level?

Or, what is his grip on the concepts required at that age, which his peers have already covered?

Is your child future-ready?

Well, that is exactly what an adaptive assessment tool does: helps a student prepare for the future by capturing the skills, strengths, gaps, aptitude, and knowledge of a child. We need to realize that an effective assessment is an Assessment for Learning rather than an Assessment of Learning alone.

Your Knowledge Companion on this journey

The Education system today is largely focused on assessing the present level of knowledge of the child, which is an assessment of learning. At KOMPANIONS, an ed-tech company, the focus is on assessing the knowledge gaps that remain in the present level and desired level of knowledge through a state-of-the-art DAPR (Diagnostic, Adaptive, Predictive, and Remedial) assessment architecture and benchmarking practices.

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