Early Childhood Assessment

I have had to ustilize a variety of assessment tools in an early childhood education setting during my time at Post University. Specifically, I was required to complete a lengthy assessment project in my Emergent Literacy class. I was required to select a student who struggled with reading and writing and then had to adminster many different assessments. I performed these assessments on three different days in the time period of a month. Some of the tools that I used for this literacy case study included; an audio taping to adminster a langauge development assessment, student interviews with checklists to assess concepts about books and conventions of print and letter recognition. However, the assessment that I remember best is the phonological awareness test that I did with the child.
MY
For example, to assess the child’s understanding of the concept of spoken word, we played a game that involved words and colored chips. I spoke a sentence and then demonstrated how to push a chip forward for each spoken word in the sentence and asked the child to do the same. This process was repeated with a total of four different sentences and the child seemed to like using the chips to represent the words in the sentences. However, all of the tests took approximately thirty minutes and the child seemed to be getting restless and unfocused towards the end of testing.
Using this type of testing made me feel as though I would be able to accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses in regards to phonological awareness and then be able to work on the needed areas in order to improve their literacy skills. I also felt as though it was an easy and straight-forward way to assess the student’s skills. However, I did feel bad because the test kind of took a long time, the child was becoming restless, and I didn’t want him to be pulled out of class for too long.
ASSESSMENT