The Role of Testing and Assessment in Early Childhood Education

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Critical thinking and problem solving are skills required to increase the growth in children’s learning and development, especially if our goal is to prepare a community of effective life-long learners. Researchers find that the definitions of each of these skills vary among the education community, but the necessity of student acquisition of these skills is demanded in the learning process. Critical thinking and problem solving offer an extensive, fundamental skill to the educating of children. This skill set is necessary for student understanding, development, and learning. It has been found that the internalization and automatic use of these skills would greatly increase student opportunity as future learners provide insight of understanding of concepts and provide an alternative way of thinking to a demanding world of self-monitoring, reflecting, and knowing.

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For these reasons, ongoing classroom assessment is the glue that binds teaching and learning together and allows educators to monitor their efficacy and student learning. In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments.

New types of technical “assessments offer the potential to understand more than whether a student answered a test question right or wrong” (Tucker, 2009, p. 1) during an exam. An educator can use several methods “of media that allow for both visual and graphical representations, we can present complex, multi-step problems for students to solve, and we can collect detailed information about an individual student’s approach to problem solving” (Tucker, 2009, p. 1). With this new way of collecting information it will allow the educator to understand how their students came up their answers. This can show the educator how they need modify their teaching to help promote their students educational growth. The difference between formative and summative assessments is: formative assessment is part of the teaching process, while summative assessment is the evaluation given at the end of the lesson or school year.

Students may have a hard time in a traditional classroom where they are forced to work and their time to explore is taken away. Reading comprehension is one of the many important skills that students learn beginning from a young age. Education has shifted to be of more importance for all children, and parents, teachers, and curriculum developers need to have the best resources for helping students learn to be great readers. So, as the demand for school readiness grows, and the importance of reading comprehension is stressed, researchers can look at the school that works best. This can be done through direct comparison of reading comprehensio... ... middle of paper ... ...urnal of Wellbeing, 1(2), 214-225.

Early Childhood Investigations. Retrieved February 4, 2012, from http://www.earlychildhoodwebinars.org/2011/02/understanding-the-changes-to-the-head-start-outcomes-framework-by-karen-nemeth/ Morrison, G. (2006). Education.com. Retrieved February 4, 2012, from http://www.education.com/reference/article/new-direction-early-childhood-education/