According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC) developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) position paper (1997) detailing how to assess children’s learning and development, assessment “recognizes individual variation in learners and allows for differences in styles and rates of learning” (p. 14) and “decisions...such as enrollment or placement are never made on the basis of a single assessment or screening device, but are based on multiple sources of relevant information...” (p. 14).
While many teachers aspire to achieve such a holistic and individualistic view of a child’s learning, 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) has created an enveloping and invasive standardized testing environment which necessarily tunnels an early childhood educator’s vision, from kindergarten readiness in preschool to the actual test administration commencement in third grade. The cost of this ever-earlier pressure manifests itself as a direct and often schizophrenic tension between policy-makers’ goals for public education and teachers’ hopes for their individual students (Hargreaves, Earl, and Schmidt, 2002).
To Download This Article, Click HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment
please write your comment, critic, suggestion, and question here. Do not forget to write your email, so if you need a response we can response to your email directly.