Monitoring And Assessment In Early Years
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Child Study and Classroom Based Observation
Should We Make Time To Watch and Listen?
Introduction
The traditional place for assessment within teaching is at the end of a topic or significant time period when the teacher wishes to know how much information students have retained. This form of assessment often takes the form of a written test that is designed to give students a grade or level.
Many researchers, however, believe that teaching and learning is a cyclical process that begins and ends with assessment:
Assessment is a tool that begins and ends successful teaching. At the beginning it establishes what is currently known and at the end it establishes what has been learnt as the result of the planned curriculum.
(Fisher, 1998, 20)
The implication of this is that assessment should be a regular feature of teaching so that practitioners can use the results in their planning:
Assessment occurs on a day-to day basis and involves practitioners modifying and adjusting their interactions, provision and support, and providing feedback to children.
(Miller et al, 2005, 141)
Unfortunately, assessment is a time-consuming process (Hamilton et al, 2003) and it may be that it is not the best use of a practitioners time. This report will take the form of a child study and will investigate how essential it is for practitioners to carry out ongoing observations and assessment in an early years setting.
Firstly, the childs biographical details will be set out, in order to give the reader a picture of the child and also the setting in which the observations were made.
There will then be a discussion of the methods used to collect the data in the study. Each method will be critically discussed and an explanation will be given as to why it was chosen by the researcher. The limitations of the study will also be explained, for example, the short time period over which the observations were made.
The data will then be analysed and the researcher will attempt to place the childs achievements in the context of the Foundation Stage Profile. In this section, targets for future learning will be suggested, it is hoped that this will demonstrate how valuable these observations are for practitioners:
Teachers need to employ their observation and questioning skills in order to ascertain what children know, what they can do and where they need to go next.
(OHara, 2000, 102)
Following this, the place of observation in the classroom and the practical implications of the results of the child study will be considered.
The report will conclude that it is vital to Ðmake time to watch and listen in order to be an effective early years practitioner.
Focus of Child Study
The focus child in this study will be referred to as BA.
BA is male, he was four years old at the time these observations were made but would shortly celebrate his fifth birthday. He lives on a housing estate with his father, mother and older brother.
He attends a large school in an urban area and is part of a reception class of 27 pupils.
The class is split into four ability groups; red, blue, green and yellow. Red group are of the highest ability, then blue, green and yellow. BA is in blue group.
The school day is organised into four sessions of an hour and a quarter, each session begins with carpet time for the whole class. The pupils are expected to do one adult-led, core task in their groups in each session, these tasks last approximately ten minutes. The pupils are then allowed to choose freely from a variety of other resources that are laid out for them.
BA is a quiet child and does not often volunteer answers in whole class situations, however, he interacts with other male pupils during free choice with confidence. He demonstrates a clear preference for physically demanding activities such as bikes, and finds it difficult to concentrate on more sedentary activities for long periods of time (appendix 4).
Methods of Observation Used
In this child study, observations of a single child were made over a period of four weeks during the autumn term. The observations were made by adults who worked with the class full time over the four-week period in a variety of roles in support of the class teacher. The adults were therefore a regular feature of the classroom and this helped the children feel at ease with their presence.
When collecting data the first thing to consider is whether the information gathered should be quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative data is in numerical form and usually provides answers to specific questions, for example, in this study it could have been used to check BAs ability to count to 10, the researcher could have asked BA to count to 10 on five different occasions and made a numerical record of how many times he was able to do it correctly. The advantage of this would be that the data could be subjected to statistical analysis, in our example above we may wish to establish the percentage of times BA completed the task correctly and we would thus be able to establish the reliability of his counting skills. A further advantage of quantitative data is that experiments can often be replicated and the numerical data can be compared easily. In the case of a child study, however, there are some disadvantages to using quantitative data, the main one of these being that it allows a researcher to answer specific questions only. A child in a free-play situation may be demonstrating a wide variety of knowledge but, numerically, it is difficult to record anything except the specific knowledge we are looking for. Furthermore, when results are presented numerically they often lose information about the context in which they were gathered and this may affect the interpretation.
Qualitative data is not numerical and is more likely to take the form of observations or interviews. Obviously, it is very difficult to perform any statistical analysis on this kind of data. A further problem is that another researcher cannot replicate this data and therefore it is difficult to check the validity