What Are the Components of Assessment?

Question

Answer

There are four components of the assessment process.  These include observation, written records, portfolios, and family information.

Observation

Observation is gathering unbiased information about each child, noting what the child is doing without any interpretation or explanation about why he's doing it. Observation is the basis of what educators do when working with children. The unbiased or without interpretation or explanation piece is really important here because when you're observing young children, you're simply documenting what you see.

It's very tempting though to interpret what we see, especially when observation is used to try to understand children's behavior or challenging behaviors. It's very tempting for us to say, "Well, he threw a fit because someone took his toy," or "He hit somebody because he didn't like it." If you take any kind of training or class on observation, that's one of the major things that they'll talk about is being unbiased or non-opinionated. Your opinion should not be included in observations.

Written Records

Observations include written records. These are objective, also known as unbiased, recordings of the observation that should be included in the child's portfolio and in the educator's notes to help plan for future activities and help them remember what they have seen. Written records may include rating scales, checklists, anecdotal notes, tallies, and other forms and observations recorded by the educator. Being objective is really important as well because if these are in the child's portfolio, that means the parents will see them. You don't want to have something written about a young child that has your judgment or your opinion in it. Sharing that with the parent could be a very sticky situation.

When I was a young, unseasoned teacher, I wrote a note to a child's parent and it said that he hit someone for no reason. The parent taught me a very good lesson about the fact that it was probably for a reason. I just didn't see what the reason was and that really wasn't fair to write on a note to a parent that their child did something for no reason. That's a lesson that I've carried with me as I've gone on in my career. I've tried to teach other people about it too because that was my opinion in that documentation. It is very important that we keep our opinions to ourselves. We should remain objective in those moments when we're observing and doing written records.

Portfolios

Many of you may already do portfolios for your children, or work with your children to complete them. If you don't do them or if you've not heard of them, they're chronological collections of written records combined with samples of the child's work. This might include photographs, artwork, or dictated stories, where the child tells you the story and you write it down. It also might include video records, audio records, and other items that you feel would give an accurate picture of the child's development.

One of the most fun things I've ever done as a teacher involved audio recordings of children singing a song for Mother's Day. I recorded all the children singing a special Mother's Day song to their mother, grandmother, aunt, or whoever was an important female or another person in their life if they didn't have a female in their home life situation. It was the most tender-hearted thing that I've ever done. I had mothers, grandmothers, and aunties in tears when it was time to play those recordings at our Mother's Day breakfast. That would be an example of an audio recording you might include in a portfolio. It could also be a child singing a nursery rhyme that they finally learned all the verses to.

Portfolios are designed to help the educator in the assessment process. They allow us to go back to the beginning of the year and see progress, such as at the beginning of the year she was attempting to write her name versus now at Christmas, she can write all of the letters of her name. Also, it's a huge benefit to be able to show parents the growth of the child. There are so many times that parents came to me and said, "Well, what are you actually doing with my child because all I see is that she's just playing all day?" When you pull out their portfolio and say, " I know that when you come in to pick her up you're concerned because she's always in art, but look at what she's doing in art." Or, "I know you're concerned because every time you come to pick him up he's always in blocks. But look at what he's learning in the block center, look at the growth here." You have something visual that you can show which can make a huge difference to a parent.

You can also use portfolios with other teachers. As a child moved up from another class to the preschool class, we would get the portfolio from that other classroom. At the end of the child's time at our school, we would have a really thick portfolio with stuff from infancy all the way up to preschool. It was very touching for the parents and nice to have, but you could really see the child's growth over time. That's actually what a portfolio is designed to show. There are three different types of portfolios.

One type of portfolio is a learning portfolio. That is a selection of a child's work that's used to evaluate the child's development and learning process. Often, it's referred to as a working portfolio, meaning it's ongoing and we're always adding to it. We might be modifying some of the things so it's very fluid and not static.

Another type is a pass-along portfolio which is what I referred to that we sent to the next classroom. It is a collection of work samples, narrative reports, and other evidence intended to be passed along to future educators for the purpose of providing a continuous assessment record. When I worked for the public schools, we would send a copy of the child's preschool portfolio to their kindergarten school. If we didn’t know who the child’s teacher was going to be, we would address it to “The kindergarten teacher of Natasha Kile” so the kindergarten teacher would have some information about the child that was joining the class. I did hear from some of the kindergarten teachers that it was helpful.

The third type of portfolio is the private portfolio. This sounds very secretive and spy-like, but actually, it's just a collection of information about a child that's considered confidential and is only for you, your supervisor, and other people that work with the child. I’ve used a private portfolio in situations where we had some pretty significant challenging behavior from a young child, when we had children who we might suspect were having troubles at home, or situations where there was something going on within the home. Sometimes we had actually referred them or called the hotline on them. This was a good place to keep this kind of documentation.

These items were not just placed with a child’s artwork or other work samples.  The hotline reporting form or other documentation of challenging situations were stored in the private portfolio. This allowed us to look at the documentation over time and see if there were any patterns, trends, or triggers. We could also look to see what the antecedent to the behavior was and what the consequence of the behavior was.

We used a little notebook that we would keep just for that child in a locked cabinet so that we would have the documentation and information if we ever needed it to assist in getting the child services.  These could be for the therapist, social worker, or whoever was working with the child.

I do caution you about sending the private portfolio on to the next teacher because sometimes it can cause labeling to happen. For example, if a child was considered challenging in the three-year-old room and we send this information to the next teacher, the new teacher may have concerns about the child before they enter the classroom. We want to give that child a fresh start. I would caution you about passing on the private portfolio unless it's really needed.

Family Information

Families are the best source of information concerning their child. After all, they are the expert on their child. You might be an expert on child development, preschool, literacy, or other things, but the parent is the expert on that child and always will be. It's very important that we get all the information we can get from parents. Not all of us have parents that are very involved. If you've got parents that are willing to share, take all of it that you can. The more information you have, the better prepared you're going to be to engage and enrich that child's learning and really connect with that child and their family.

The information that you get from the family could consist of interviews and any information provided by the family that you can include in the assessment process. Families should be consulted and included in every stage of the assessment. Several of those assessment tools that we talked about have parent components to them.

In the program I supervised for many years, we would send home a blank copy of the assessment tool to the family and ask them to fill it out based on what they had seen at home. We'd fill the same one out at school and then compare the two. Some people might say, "Oh, I would never do that because parents will always rate their child so high, and they're not going to be honest. Parents always have a rose-colored view of their child." In my experience, I have noticed that it's the opposite. I've noticed that parents are actually harder on their children than we are as early childhood professionals because a lot of times parents don't have the education that we have and the knowledge to say, "Oh gosh, that's not developmentally appropriate to expect that yet." Your experience might be a little bit different, but in mine, most of the time parents rated their children lower than the teacher.

It's always so nice to have parent input, not only for the value that the input itself provides, but for the benefits of making the parent feel included. It treats the parent as the expert on that child and enables you to really show the parent that we value what they have to say about their child and the expertise that they bring to the table.

When we combine these four components of assessment, then we should have an accurate and authentic picture of each child's development, knowledge of what the child does well, as well as any issues that might need to be addressed. Through thoughtful and careful assessment, we can plan curriculum to meet the developmental needs of each child in our care.

It's very important that we understand the accuracy and authentic piece. I’ve used the word authentic a couple of times throughout this class, and I want to make sure that everybody understands that. Authentic means real. There's a major difference between doing an assessment just to do an assessment, and then doing an assessment to actually get some real, authentic, meaningful data or information from it. That's that authentic piece.

This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Purposes and Benefits of Assessment, presented by Natasha Crosby Kile, MS.