About the Book
For courses in Assessment in Early Childhood
Assessing and Guiding Young Children's Development and Learning is designed to help teachers conduct authentic, early childhood, classroom-based assessment, interpret the information that's gathered, and ultimately use the information to plan responsive, supportive curriculum that ensures optimal learning for children, ages three to eight. The authors include coverage of the teacher's legal, ethical, and professional responsibilities in assessment; how to organise for summary assessment and formative assessment; how to understand standardised assessments; and how to communicate with parents. A special appendix helps teachers design assessments in all developmental domains and includes suggested behaviours to observe and charts to help teachers identify the next steps in learning and development. The 6th Edition has been revised and updated to reflect the rapidly developing concepts of appropriate assessment, expected educational outcomes, the way young children develop and learn, how the authentic assessment process relates to the use of formal state-mandated assessments, and the early childhood teacher's assessment responsibilities.
Features - Meet the current expectations of today's teachers, and keep pace with the changing emphasis in educational assessment from sorting and ranking children to helping them learn.
- Stay on top of the legal, ethical, and professional responsibilities today's educators face. An emphasis is placed on ways teachers can collect and use information that is reliable, valid, and fair to all children.
- Learn what early childhood educators need to know about standardised tests and other published assessment instruments in order to fulfill their roles and responsibilities. A full chapter distills this lengthy topic into manageable information.
- Get easy reference and analysis guides in Appendix A, which presents development and learning accomplishments and continua for major child development and curriculum areas.
- Look for the red flags - the patterns of behaviour that signal the need for a closer look-in Appendix B.
- Personal reflection prompts show the teacher as a person in the concepts.
- Study and discussion prompts promote complex thinking about how to apply assessment concepts and principles.
- Summaries highlight important points in each chapter.
- Suggested readings show readers where to find additional information on key topics.
- A Glossary defines current assessment, testing, and curriculum terminology in clear, non-technical language.
- Examples and applications include numerous charts, figures, forms, and illustrations clarifying what is discussed and linking the topics to the real world of children and schools.
- Understand and appreciate assessment as:
- The book looks at assessment as an evolving, expanding aspect of teaching and learning, shows how formative assessment can improve children's learning, and discusses its relationship to more traditional summative evaluation.
- The book focuses on ways of finding out about and keeping track of children's development and learning as part of ongoing classroom life and typical activities of children, and shows how this kind of assessment can be used with young children in early childhood settings.
- Readers see how to organise the information they need to learn as well as what they will need to do as teachers.
- With an emphasis on the teacher's professional responsibility to interpret and use assessment results to help all children learn, the book includes suggestions for: improving the reliability, validity, and fairness of assessment; meeting ethical and legal responsibilities, and communicating with others about assessment results.
New to this edition - One page examples of assessment forms available on the web or of commercially available assessments have been replaced with live links so that students can explore the full assessments and the publisher's web pages.
- NEW! Information about the Common Core State Standards has been added to all discussions of state and local standards.
- UPDATED throughout. The references, suggested readings, developmental and learning accomplishments, glossary, and terminology have all been updated for this edition.
- Ensure comprehension of the concepts with a variety of learning and reinforcement aids:
- NEW! Teaching objectives have been added to every chapter. They mirror the major headings in each chapter.
- NEW! Discussion prompts bring the concepts to life with links to the Internet.
Table of Contents:
- CHAPTER 1 Assessment in Early Childhood: A Work in Progress
- CHAPTER 2 Legal, Ethical, and Professional Responsibilities in Assessment
- CHAPTER 3 Why, What, and When to Assess
- CHAPTER 4 Documenting: Collecting Information
- CHAPTER 5 Documenting: Recording Information
- CHAPTER 6 Compiling and Summarizing Information
- CHAPTER 7 Interpreting Assessment Information
- CHAPTER 8 Using Assessment Information
- CHAPTER 9 Organizing for Assessment
- CHAPTER 10 Standardized Tests: What Early Childhood Teachers Should Know
- CHAPTER 11 Communicating and Collaborating Using Assessment Processes and Results
- APPENDIX A Assessment and Analysis Guides
- APPENDIX B Developmental Red Flags for Children Ages 3 to 5
- Glossary
About the Author :
Oralie McAfee is professor emerita of early childhood education at Metropolitan State University of Denver. She is the author of books, research papers, articles, curriculum and teacher-training materials, and other publications related to working with young children and their families in the classroom and home, and has presented on these topics throughout the United States. She has done research on assessment practices and needs in Head Start and in selected state-funded prekindergarten programs. She is the author (with Deborah J. Leong and Elena Bodrova) of Basics of Assessment: A Primer for Early Childhood Educators (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2004).
Deborah J. Leong is a professor emerita of psychology at Metropolitan State University of Denver and co-founder and Executive Director of the Tools of the Mind Curriculum Project, a Vygotskian-based early childhood teacher-training program. She is also a research fellow at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). She is co-author with Dr.s McAfee and Bodrova of Basics of Assessment (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2004). Dr. Leong is also co-author with Dr. Bodrova of Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education (Merrill/Prentice Hall, 1996) and four educational videos (Davidson Films). She and Dr. Bodrova have written many articles on assessment, play, early literacy, and the development of self-regulation in young children.
Elena Bodrova is a senior researcher at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) in Denver, Colorado. Prior to her coming to the United States, she was a senior researcher at the Russian Center for Educational Innovations and the Russian Institute for Preschool Education. She received her Ph.D. from the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, Moscow, Russia, and her M.A. from Moscow State University. In addition to her work with Dr. Leong, she co-authored the book, For the Love of Words: Vocabulary Instruction That Works, Grades K-6 (Jossey-Bass) with Diane E. Paynter and Jane K. Doty.
