References:
Berger, K. S. (2009). The developing person through childhood (5th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
http://www.rcgates.com/psyc/c8.html
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Thoughts on assessing young children
I think it is important that we assess children's development as the proceed through their education but I do not neccessarily believe that standardized testing is the most beneficial for all students. I believe there are children who just naturally perform better on standardized tests than others and with that in mind, I feel that some children are already at a disadvantage before they even begin. We need to also take into consideration the process of the developing brain. Lateralization in brain development occurs during early childhood (Berger, 2009) as well as a preference for being left-handed or right-handed which determines which hemisphere of the brain is able to be the dominant one. Being left-handed or "no handed" as I am, my reasoning skills and being able to vision things through a three dimensional perspective are things that come much easier so exams like mathematics where you can visualy write everything out or draw or even build like in geometry made sense but being given mutiple answers that at least a few of them could be correct, would cause me tremendous stress as a student. I did very well in school but there was times when I found something to be difficult because I could not visualize it so subjects like mathematics and science came easy where is subjects like history and some english classes were difficult but being an A student doing poorly in any subject was a surprise and at the time, I did not realize why certain ways of thinking were just difficult for me. I think a major factor into the reason we don't address left-handed versus right-handed is because only 10% of the population is left-handed or ambidextrous. (Gates) And the funny thing about it, is that in my previous carrier as a chemist, I can honestly say that the proportion of people who were left handed were about equal to the ones that were right-handed. Pretty significant since the percentage of the whole population is so small. I don't feel that being left or right handed is addressed in school at all but I feel that it tells you something very important about the individual and should be addressed.
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Hi Tracy,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that standardize testing is the most beneficial way to asses children. I have never been a good test taker, even growing up in Liberia, my teachers knew that this was one of my weakest skills, but there was no developmental program put in placed to help me grow in that area. I think that was not part of the educational curriculum. I was still able to excel in school through life with no problem. Everyone is different and unique in their own ways.
Tracy,
ReplyDeleteI too, am not an advocate of standardized testing. As you mentioned, some children's brain anatomy inhibits them from being good test takers. Some children are abstract learners and some children are concrete learners. Standardized testing does not always give a true measure of a child's achievement. Many children suffer from test anxiety, and do not perform well on formal test. Therefore, other measures need to be used as well to assess children differently in order to get a true representation of their knowledge base. I like the approach that is used in Nigeria. They use a more holistic approach called Continuous Assessments. They do not use a single test to determine a child's academic growth.