For courses in Assessment in Early Childhood

Assessing and Guiding Young Children's Development and Learning is designed to help teachers conduct authentic, early childhood, classroom-based assessment, interpret the information that's gathered, and ultimately use the information to plan responsive, supportive curriculum that ensures optimal learning for children, ages three to eight. The authors include coverage of the teacher's legal, ethical, and professional responsibilities in assessment; how to organise for summary assessment and formative assessment; how to understand standardised assessments; and how to communicate with parents. A special appendix helps teachers design assessments in all developmental domains and includes suggested behaviours to observe and charts to help teachers identify the next steps in learning and development. The 6th Edition has been revised and updated to reflect the rapidly developing concepts of appropriate assessment, expected educational outcomes, the way young children develop and learn, how the authentic assessment process relates to the use of formal state-mandated assessments, and the early childhood teacher's assessment responsibilities.

• Meet the current expectations of today's teachers, and keep pace with the changing emphasis in educational assessment from sorting and ranking children to helping them learn.
• Stay on top of the legal, ethical, and professional responsibilities today's educators face. An emphasis is placed on ways teachers can collect and use information that is reliable, valid, and fair to all children.
• Learn what early childhood educators need to know about standardised tests and other published assessment instruments in order to fulfill their roles and responsibilities. A full chapter distills this lengthy topic into manageable information.
• Get easy reference and analysis guides in Appendix A, which presents development and learning accomplishments and continua for major child development and curriculum areas.
• Look for the red flags - the patterns of behaviour that signal the need for a closer look-in Appendix B.
• Personal reflection prompts show the teacher as a person in the concepts.
• Study and discussion prompts promote complex thinking about how to apply assessment concepts and principles.
• Summaries highlight important points in each chapter.
• Suggested readings show readers where to find additional information on key topics.
• A Glossary defines current assessment, testing, and curriculum terminology in clear, non-technical language.
• Examples and applications include numerous charts, figures, forms, and illustrations clarifying what is discussed and linking the topics to the real world of children and schools.
• Understand and appreciate assessment as:
• The book looks at assessment as an evolving, expanding aspect of teaching and learning, shows how formative assessment can improve children's learning, and discusses its relationship to more traditional summative evaluation.
• The book focuses on ways of finding out about and keeping track of children's development and learning as part of ongoing classroom life and typical activities of children, and shows how this kind of assessment can be used with young children in early childhood settings.
• Readers see how to organise the information they need to learn as well as what they will need to do as teachers.
• With an emphasis on the teacher's professional responsibility to interpret and use assessment results to help all children learn, the book includes suggestions for: improving the reliability, validity, and fairness of assessment; meeting ethical and legal responsibilities, and communicating with others about assessment results.

• One page examples of assessment forms available on the web or of commercially available assessments have been replaced with live links so that students can explore the full assessments and the publisher's web pages.
• NEW! Information about the Common Core State Standards has been added to all discussions of state and local standards.
• UPDATED throughout. The references, suggested readings, developmental and learning accomplishments, glossary, and terminology have all been updated for this edition.
• Ensure comprehension of the concepts with a variety of learning and reinforcement aids:
• • NEW! Teaching objectives have been added to every chapter. They mirror the major headings in each chapter.
  • NEW! Discussion prompts bring the concepts to life with links to the Internet.