Standardized Testing For Preschoolers?
Above is a link to an article about the increase in standardized testing for preschoolers.
I am all for people putting more attention on Early Childhood and taking it more seriously, but using standardized testing at that age is ridiculous and developmentally inappropriate. Here is a great quote from the article to illustrate why "I know a girl who, when given an aptitude test at age 4, refused to answer the questions because she just didn’t feel like it that day. That’s the way 4-year-olds act sometimes. She was scored as essentially having the aptitude of a monkey. That’s the way standardized assessments are, and that’s no way to judge a 4-year-old." From personal experience there have been many times when my initial assessment of a child's strengths and weaknesses turned out to be completely wrong in the long run. In addition, children may show wide range of abilities depending on context like who they are with and their comfort level at the time. I remember a 4 year old boy who started out being able to do not much more than scribble on a page and then a few months later he was drawing detailed pictures of dinosaurs, whales, and penguins and describing to me each animal’s different characteristics in detail. This is not even taking into account how big of a role context plays at that age (and in any age). Depending on how comfortable the child is with their surroundings you will see wide ranges of their ability which makes any quick snap shot assessment pointless. While it is harder to quantify, in the preschool age, I think portfolio style assessments that include teacher observations, samples of a child’s work, pictures of the child’s creations, and if possible and consented to by the parents short videos of things like the child explaining how they made a block tower are much better at figuring out where a child is developmentally. As for evaluating teacher performance, again I think direct observation from a Principal/Director/ECE Expert along with input from parents is a lot more effective. While in both of evaluating students and teachers it would be more time consuming than a standardized style test these ways than via a more standardized test, using a standardized test to get invalid data is just a waste of time and resources.
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