Types of Assessments What is an assessment? Assessment is the process of observing, recording, and documenting children’s growth and behavior. The main purpose of assessment is for teachers to get information about children’s needs. Assessment also help teacher plan an appropriate curriculum. In my site where I am working right now, we mainly use 3 types of assessment are anecdotal record, checklist, and participation charts.
Anecdotal notes are the simplest form of direct observation, it simply consist on writing a narrative note, but the note must contain who was involve, what happen, when did it happen, and where did it happen. During your observation you will record how children communicate, both verbally and nonverbally; also include how they look and exactly what they do. Anecdotal records can be one of the easiest forms of assessment, since it requires no special setting and it’s basically a short story of an incident, where you collect as many details as possible. Another form of assessment we use at my site is the checklist. A checklist is where you record the presence or absence of a specific behavior. They are use when many different items need to be observed. Checklist maybe designed for any developmental domain, such as physical, social, emotional or cognitive. The advantage of a checklist is that the information can be quickly recorded at anytime during class hours, but it’s a lack of detailed information. A checklist is basically a table with goals, where you put yes if they have met the goal or no if they haven’t. A participation chart can be developed to gain information on specific aspects of children’s behavior. You can use the participation chart to record their activity preferences during self-selected play. Doing this type of assessment sometimes teachers find that children’s preferences do not match their needs and they can introduce them to new materials. We as teacher should choose the type of assessment depending on the type of behavior we want to assess and the amount of information we need to be collected. The 3 types of assessment that best work for us are anecdotal record, checklist, and participation charts.