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I still remember when, at a school where I worked as a teacher for 5-year-olds (quite a few years ago 😛), every Friday I had to give “a little test” to see if they had learned the week’s content. Yes, every Friday, one by one.
From that test came a number, a grade, that I had to keep track of to see their progress. The truth is, this number didn’t give me much information I hadn’t already seen during playtime or in whole-class sessions. That number also didn’t tell me how to help those students who were struggling. And for them, that number had no meaning either.
And I wondered why I was spending time doing that, instead of continuing to explore and play with math.
And listen, I’m not saying we shouldn’t work on paper; what I want is for us to reflect on assessment, one of the words we hear most in education. But when we talk about early childhood, what does it really mean to assess? It actually has a very different meaning: it’s a tool to support learning processes, not to put final periods.
As Neus Sanmartí reminds us, summative assessment alone is not enough. The type of assessment that better regulates student learning is formative and educational, the kind that helps them move forward. And as Arregi Landa, Barandiaran, and Iñurrategi say in the book Assessment in Early Childhood Education (2021), it’s about better understanding children’s development so we can offer them the opportunities they need.
In our daily practice, three simple questions can help us:
- Why do we assess? To check what they’re learning, give them good feedback, adjust our practice, and involve families.
- What do we assess? Not only content, but also mathematical processes, skills, and social-emotional abilities they put into play.
- How do we assess? Mainly through observation, conversation, and documentation. Assessment is a cycle: we collect evidence, analyze it, and make decisions.
If we think about it, you’re already assessing all the time: when you observe how a child organizes materials, when you listen to how they explain their strategy, or when you collect a Representation Page at the end of a Workshop to interpret what they wanted to represent.
Julia represents various solutions for decomposing 6 on the Representation Page.
Two children play at creating towers that represent the quantity shown on each number card.
If you want to learn more, we recommend reading our article How to Assess in Early Childhood Education, where you’ll find examples and concrete ideas to put this approach into practice.
This is a topic that could lead to many hours of debate, and I’d love to continue chatting with you. So if you have any comments, I’d be delighted to hear from you! 🙂
