1. Chapter 6 examines the purpose of authentic assessment, as well as the pros and cons of using authentic assessments with children. Imagine that your program, school, or center has adopted performance assessment to measure a child’s growth. Your supervisor has asked you to create a letter for families explaining performance assessment. In your letter, you must address the following:
Post your letter to the discussion forum.
Guided Response: Review several of your peers’ responses. Respond to at least two of your peers by providing feedback on their letter. Remember to make sure your feedback is professional. When providing feedback to your peers about their letter, be sure to consider the following points:
Though two replies is the basic expectation, for deeper engagement and learning you are encouraged to provide responses to any comments or questions others have given to you. Remember, continuing to engage with peers and the instructor will further the conversation and provide you with opportunities to demonstrate your content expertise, critical thinking, and real-world experiences with this topic.
2. “At its core, a diagnostic assessment is a detailed investigation of children’s strengths and skill gaps that permits targeted intervention.” (Howard, V. F., & Aiken, E., 2015, p. 282). Informal diagnostics assessments can and should be developed by professionals who work with young children. This allows them to observe how and what the child is learning so they can make informed decisions about how to help the child. One way to do this is by developing a learning activity that allows you to determine where the child is struggling with a particular skill. “Diagnostic assessments fall into two types: informal or teacher developed, and formal standardized instruments, which are professionally developed and commercially available.” (Howard, V. F., & Aiken, E., 2015, p. 282) For this discussion we will be focusing on the informal, or teacher developed, diagnostic assessments.
To begin, choose a child from Developmental Checklists Birth to Five. This must be a different child than the one you chose for your Week 3 assignment. Once you have chosen a child, you will need to identify an area of need for the child based on the checklist. Then, include the following as your initial discussion post: