Likewise, the article "Early Childhood Portfolios as a Tool for Enhancing Learning During the Transition to School" by Mun Wong delivered "The power of portfolios as a tool for fostering belonging and empowerment was evident in Gaurav’s case study, and, later, for many other children" (Wong). The author is presenting since everything is new to these children with starting school and meeting new friends, it is scary for them. If they have something they can talk about, something they share and mainly for children who are shy or having English as a second language, they do not have to talk, they can just play and as the teacher they realize the students are learning and as well as the teacher. By learning through play is extremely valuable and powerful. Formulating this portfolio …show more content…
in learning through play it is helping all the students settle in school much quicker and be more comfortable. The teachers noticed when the students had their portfolio with them they just seem to have this sense of confidence. The students recognize a sense of ownership over their portfolio and how the other children in the class are acknowledging their prior learning. With having these experiences for the kids in learning through play the children here remember friends from the kindergarten, they remember the teachers, and the environment in the classroom. On the other hand, some people do not agree with portfolio assessments because it is not preparing the students to do well on standardized test.
Without standardized test teachers don’t know what the students are learning and achieving is good enough and are the students able to do better and if so how. The use of portfolio assessment cannot determine how much learning has occurred to measure the comparison to a standardized test. In portfolio assessment, the learners reflect on their own work. What is in the reflections are what the students did in their portfolio and the method used to make the portfolio. Portfolio assessments can be represented as less reliable. Having to develop one's individualized criteria can be difficult or unfamiliar at first. It can be very time consuming for teachers to organize and evaluate the content of portfolios. Teachers and administration believe the portfolios are not demonstrating what students need to know. Furthermore, they are very time consuming for teachers to organize and evaluate the content of the portfolio. It can also show no pattern of growth and achievements when doing portfolios. Portfolio assessments are very hard to analyze to show
change. In conclusion, assessments are a significant part of education and as a teacher it is their choice on how to assess the students. Some students like taking multiple choice assessments and some like performance base assessments. With assessments it helps the teacher know where the students' strengths and weaknesses are. Some teachers have portfolio assessments, so they can track their students' process. With this method of assessments portfolios are beneficial because with the samples of work throughout the school shows the teacher, the students and parents how much they improved throughout the year. Portfolio assessments reveal to the students their strengths and weaknesses and how much skills they learned throughout the year. In contrast, some people do not agree with portfolio assessments and think they are not useful. Some teachers trust portfolios do not show any progress in what they are doing. Also, teachers have to take a lot of time out to arrange a portfolio because it takes so much time.
Current educational policy and practice asserts that increased standardized student testing is the key to improving student learning and is the most appropriate means for holding individual schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Instead, it has become a tool solely for summarizing what students have learned and for ranking students and schools. The problem is standardized tests cannot provide the information about student achievement that teachers and students need day-to-day. Classroom assessment can provide this kind of information.
Although standardized testing is supposed to reflect what the students have learned, they often times do not to the fullest potential. What some educators may not take into consideration is the limited resources and ways that teachers are able to get the information across. Standardized testing not only has a negative effect on the things listed above but also a negative impact on the learning styles. Many standardized test are created to improve student achievement, but studies show that the testing format has not improved this at all. Standardized tests also do not incorporate all of the different types of learning, and since this is the case not all of the testing results are measured accurately, which can make the results be very incorrect.
Morality, which is one’s general standards about right and wrong behavior, also includes prosocial behavior and other traits such as honesty, fairness, and concern about other people’s rights and welfare (Omrod, 2014). Both morality and prosocial behavior involve multiple parts of the brain, emotions and complex reasoning abilities. Some age-typical characteristics for preschool aged children include, some understanding that behaviors causing physical or psychological harm are morally wrong, a sense of guilt and shame about misbehaviors that cause harm to others, also display empathy and sympathy, and children at this age also show an appreciation for the need to be fair.
This portfolio will be focusing on the holistic development of a child. It will include: three observations (using various methods) and an in depth evaluation of each observation, which will assess the child’s current development and their individual next steps.
Standardized testing is not the best way to measure how well a teacher teaches or how much a student has learned. Schools throughout the United States put their main focus on standardized tests; these examinations put too much pressure on the teachers and students and cause traumatizing events. Standardized testing puts strain on teachers and students causing unhealthy occurrences, Common Core is thrown at teachers with no teaching on how to teach the new way which dampers testing scores for all students, and the American College Test determines whether a child gets into college or not based on what they have learned during high school. Standardized tests are disagreeable; tests should not determine ranking of people.
Students dread the time of the year when they stop with their course material and begin to prepare for test. Everyone is in agreement that some type of revolution is needed when it comes to education; eliminating standardized test will aid the reform. The need for standardized testing has proven to be ineffective and outdated; some leading educationalist also believe this because the tests do not measure a student’s true potential. This will save money, stop labeling, and alleviate stress in students and teachers.
tests were primarily employed as measures of student achievement that could be reported to parents, and as a means of noting state and district trends (Moon 2) . Teachers paid little attention to these tests, which in turn had little impact on curriculum. However, in the continuing quest for better schools and high achieving students, testing has become a central focus of policy and practice. Standardized tests are tests that attempt to present unbiased material under the same, predetermined conditions and with consistent scoring and interpretation so that students have equal opportunities to give correct answers and receive an accurate assessment. The idea is that these similarities allow the highest degree of certainty in comparing result...
Standardized testing is not an effective way to test the skills and abilities of today’s students. Standardized tests do not reveal what a student actually understands and learns, but instead only prove how well a student can do on a generic test. Schools have an obligation to prepare students for life, and with the power standardized tests have today, students are being cheated out of a proper, valuable education and forced to prepare and improve their test skills. Too much time, energy, and pressure to succeed are being devoted to standardized tests. Standardized testing, as it is being used presently, is a flawed way of testing the skills of today’s students.
There’s nothing worse than to have students sum up all their knowledge, skills, thoughts, talents, and abilities into one multiple-choice test with one “right” answer. This is why assessments must encompass more ways of evaluating students than a paper and pencil strategy that does not account for the various competences of every student. This is one of the many reasons why standardized testing has been undoubtedly one of the most controversial topics in education to date. With this being said, there are alternatives to standardized tests that involve different opportunities including portable portfolios, performance exams, exhibitions, and/or recorded sessions to better “test” a student’s knowledge and abilities.
The Pacer Center has also identified in their article the importance of evaluation and assessment methods (2007). The first type of assessment is and ought to be used is performance based; for instance, individual portfolios that can illustrate a student’s strengths and weaknesses throughout a course. Teachers must be cognitive of the fact that portfolios need to demonstrate a student’s best work in properly assessing their academic improvement. In other words it is not an assessment tool to evaluate every assignment completed by the student. Even though portfolios are used by teachers in a variety of manners the most effective use is to display a student’s preeminent ...
It has been seen that factors like one’s economic and racial background can heavily influence one’s performance on a tests, as they are not given the same opportunities as those given to more affluent students. A student’s emotional well-being is also at stake as many students come out of tests doubting their overall intelligence, even though they were quite confident in the material and so much is hinged on test scores that it places a great deal of pressure on students to do well. Standardized tests also restrict teacher’s ability to learn due to the restrictions that standardized test place on the material being taught, which makes it very hard for teachers to go beyond the required and teach more interesting things. Due to the issues that have arisen from standardized tests many alternative solutions have been used and have been proven to be successful. Some good alternative solutions have been limiting the amount of standardized tests given by sampling a few students, shortening the length of exams, and allotting more time to complete these tests. Other alternatives look to more qualitative approaches in learning by implementing things like projects and portfolios that give an excellent insight to a student’s performance and
I gave birth to a healthy, beautiful baby girl named Luna. Jeffrey has taken quite a liking to being a big brother. He likes to hold and rocker her and helps with feeding her. Jeffrey is still a slow-to warm child. He can communicate fairly well and is now using mostly complete sentences and seems to understand most of what I say. He occasionally makes errors of overregularization. He has taken an interest in music and singsongs even though he usually repeats a certain part a lot. I encourage this by taking him to local performances of children’s musicals. Jeffrey has learned the routines pretty well and is reasonably cooperative for his age. He is rarely aggressive to adults or other children. Jeffrey’s fantasy play has become more elaborate and sometimes includes superheroes or cartoon
Before learning about early childhood in this class I never realized all the way children at such a young age are developing. From the second part of this course I learned how much children are developing at the early childhood stage. I never realized children learn how about their emotions, having empathy, and self-concept at such a young age. I thought children had it easy. They play with friends, start school, and just be kids. One important thing that stood out to me in this chapter is that children’s self-esteem starts at this stage. According to Berk (2012), “self-esteem is the judgments we make about our own worth and the feelings associated with those judgments (p. 366)”. Self-esteem is very important for a child to have and it can
Through assessment students and teachers are able to determine the level of mastery a student has achieved with standards taught. Both formative and summative assessment should be purposeful and targeted to gain the most accurate data to drive further instruction (Ainsworth, 2010). While this syllabus does a good job of identifying the need for both formal and informal assessments, the way in which this is communicated does not provide enough detail for understanding. Simply listing assessment types does not give any insight into how these assessments fit in the learning process of this course. While some of the assessments mentioned could be common assessments chosen by the school or district to gain insight into the effectiveness of instruction, the inclusion of authentic assessments is most beneficial to students and demonstrates learning in a context closer to that of a work environment (Rovai, 2004). Unfortunately, this particular course, according to this syllabus, relies heavily on quizzes and traditional tests and essays to form the bulk of assessment opportunities. While other activities, such as formative assessments, journaling and discussions are mentioned as possible avenues for scoring, they are given a very low percentage of the overall grade. This shows that they are not valued for their ability to show progression and mastery. If this is indeed the case, this puts the students as a
The purpose of early childhood education is to firstly learn about one’s self and agency, how one’s actions can affect and impact others; to develop a sense of identity; who you are and how you fit into this world. Experience a sense of belonging through interactions with peers and teachers whilst celebrating and sharing diverse cultures whilst embracing others. Children need to have opportunities to explore, experiment, to gain insight and knowledge in numeracy, literacy, science and social structure through innovative and richly supported curriculums (DEEWR, 2009). I have very high expectations of all children as I believe that this assists in building self-confidence and