Not everything that counts can be counted.
And not everything that can be counted counts.
— Attributed to Albert Einstein

Title: Assessment and Instruction in Early Childhood Education: Early Literacy as a Microcosm of Shifting Perspectives

 

Determining what counts, and what does not, as evidence of young children's development has   become an increasingly complex issue for early childhood educators. A broad range of stakeholders in the education of young children, from parents and teachers to administrators and policy-makers, have their own views about how children develop and how learning should be supported and assessed in American schools. There is often vehement disagreement about what constitutes appropriate evidence of achievement and equally passionate differences of opinion about how that evidence should be collected, analyzed, reported, and used to make instructional decisions (Allington, 2002; Johnson & Rogers, 2001; Salinger, 2001, 2006; Strickland & Riley-Ayers, 2006).

Some of this disagreement stems from fundamentally differing understandings of what assessment is and how it should be used. Policy makers such as federal legislators, government appointees, and state or local school board members often see assessment as a means of enforcing accountability. They look to measures of children's performance as indicative of the quality of schools, programs, and teachers. This view became especially prevalent with the advent of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) legislation that placed a premium on standardized, quantifiable data regarding children's progress in a number of academic areas, with a significant emphasis on their early literacy achievement.

Other stakeholders, especially parents and teachers who are closely engaged in children's day-to-day learning, are likely to view assessment as a means of determining what children are able to do at different points in their development and what support they will need in order to continue developing increasingly sophisticated abilities. They tend to view assessment as an ongoing process of monitoring children's development over time to ensure that learning is occurring and to guide instructional decisions that shape how they engage children in activities throughout the day.

 

CONSEQUENCES OF DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

Disagreements about the nature of learning and the purpose of assessment are not merely academic or political. There is no question that assessment often drives instruction. Mandated assessments, in particular, indicate what counts as evidence of children's learning. As standardized, skills-based assessments have moved to the forefront in the past decade, so too have the skills they measure. The more teachers are required to demonstrate children's achievement via improvements in standardized, skills-based assessments, the more they feel pressured to focus instruction on the assessed skills. Unfortunately, the skills most often assessed with standardized measures are "constrained skills" — those that are limited to small sets of knowledge that are mastered in relatively brief periods of development (Paris, 200S). Rapid naming of alphabet letters and the ability to isolate initial phonemes in spoken words are examples of constrained skills. Acquiring vocabulary and understanding the implied meaning of stories are examples of unconstrained skills because children move toward ever-increasing levels of mastery of these skills as they continue to learn them over many years.

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