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Assessment in Early Childhood

Settings
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Assessment in Early
Childhood Settings
Learning Stories

Margaret Carr
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 Margaret Carr 2001

First published 2001

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or
review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication
may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the
prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction,
in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Paul Chapman Publishing

A SAGE Publications Company
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SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

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ISBN 0 7619 6793 1

ISBN 0 7619 6794 X (pbk)

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Typeset by Dorwyn Ltd, Rowlands Castle

Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead
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Contents

Preface ix
1 A folk model of assessment – and an alternative 1
2 Learning dispositions 21
3 Interest and involvement 48
4 Persisting with difficulty and uncertainty 64
5 Communicating with others and taking responsibility 77
6 Learning stories 92
7 Describing 106
8 Discussing 125
9 Documenting 137
10 Deciding 158
11 The learning story journey 175
References 189
Index 198
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To the next two generations: Merophie, David, Moses,

Polly, Robbie and Lydia
who understand that well-being is about connecting
cognition with affect in music, dance, story and play; and
whose capacity to enjoy unscripted pathways and
uncertain outcomes I regard with esteem and admiration.
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Preface

Assessment is arguably the most powerful policy tool in education.

Not only can it be used to identify strengths and weaknesses of individ-
uals, institutions and indeed whole systems of education; it can also be
used as a powerful source of leverage to bring about change. (Broad-
foot, 1996a, p. 21; emphasis in the original)
In recent times, and for a number of reasons, the early childhood
profession in many countries has been asked to implement assessment
procedures that document children’s learning and progress. This book
tells about the work of a number of early childhood practitioners who
have been looking for a way to do this. Many practitioners have been
ill-equipped for the task. When we began this journey many of them
resisted the role of assessors standing in judgement, and said that
assessment took them away from what they liked doing best: working
and being with young children. Most of them were sceptical about the
worth of writing down and recording children’s development; they
saw it as an administrative task for external audit, a waste of their
valuable time.
I had from 1989 to 1991 been co-directing a national early childhood
curriculum development team for the Ministry of Education in New
Zealand during which we consulted widely with practitioners to de-
velop finally a curriculum that described strands of learning outcome
as well-being, belonging, communication, contribution and explora-
tion (Carr and May, 1993, 1994, 2000). This was the learning that
practitioners really valued. We emphasised curriculum as being about
‘reciprocal and responsive relationships with people, places and
things’. But the common assessment schedules at that time were more
likely to describe outcomes in terms of the children’s physical, intellec-
tual, emotional and social understandings and skills. As practitioners
worked with the new curriculum, and tried to implement new re-
quirements for assessment that followed, it appeared that ‘If we want
to see real curriculum reform, we must simultaneously achieve reform
of assessment practices’, as Sue Bredekamp and Teresa Rosegrant
(1992, p. 29) have commented. Successful work with a curriculum that

ix
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x Assessment in Early Childhood Settings

emphasised relationships and participation was going to require as-

sessment that took the same view.
This curriculum project was followed by a Ministry of Education
research project called Assessing Children’s Experiences in Early
Childhood Settings. When we began, I think the practitioners and I
wanted to seize the notion of assessment, shake it around a bit, turn
it upside down, and find something that was part of enjoying the
company of young children. The practitioners liked the idea of start-
ing with stories. So this journey towards a different way of doing
things began. We worked in five different early childhood settings.
The childcare centre was a non-profit childcare centre, run by a Com-
munity Trust in a small city (100,000 population) in New Zealand.
The centre ran two programmes: one for 10–12 under-twos and one
for 30–32 over-twos; there were ten staff. The kindergarten ran a ses-
sional programme (five mornings or three afternoons) in the same
city as the childcare centre and was one of 28 kindergartens under
the umbrella of a local kindergarten association. Set in a suburb of
low-cost housing, its catchment area also included farming commu-
nities on the outskirts of the city. The morning enrolment was 44
children, and there were three teachers. The home-based setting was
one of about 100 home-based placements run by a childcare com-
munity trust. The same trust ran two childcare centres, one of which
provided the data for the childcare setting. The group size in this
setting varied during the study from three to four, and the age group
from 14 months to 4:1 years. Documentation over three months was
analysed for the two regular children aged around three years. Te
Kohanga Reo was an urban-based total immersion early childhood
Maori language centre (early childhood). It was chartered to the Te
Kohanga Reo National Trust and licensed for up to 16 children to
attend from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Children who attended were aged from
babies to five years. The real names of staff and children are used,
with permission. The playcentre was a parent cooperative, run by
parents under the umbrella of the New Zealand Playcentre Associa-
tion. It was a sessional programme, meeting in the mornings.
Twenty-two children ranging in age from 18 months to 5 years at-
tended, and on any one morning an average of five or six parents
(during the project these were always mothers) took responsibility
for the session (a system known as team supervision). The Final
Report went to the Ministry in 1998 (Carr, 1998a). We made three
videos of the project, and added an accompanying booklet that in-
cluded four workshops and seven readings (Carr, 1998b).
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Preface xi

Another enterprise that influenced me greatly was a research study

(Carr, 1997, 2000a, 2000b, 2001) on technological practice in early child-
hood. In that study I had been closely observing four-year-olds making
things with cardboard, glue, staples and paint over a period of time,
and was wondering whether the idea of ‘learning narratives’ was a
useful one to describe (and therefore to record) what they were learn-
ing. This book also includes data from those observations of five ac-
tivities or technological practices in a kindergarten. This kindergarten
was sited in a suburb of medium-income housing; its catchment area
included a nearby area of low-cost housing and a farming community.
There are some housekeeping matters: a note about language, and
some acknowledgements. Writers in early childhood always have to
decide what label to give the adult: a teacher, an educator, a practi-
tioner, an adult, a member of staff, a (usually home-based) carer, te
kaiako, te kaiawhina. In a parent cooperative, the adults are parents;
in the context of te kohanga reo, ako means to teach (and to learn),
awhi means to care, so kaiako implies more of a ‘teaching’ role that
kaiawhina. I prefer practitioner as a general term; my students tell me
they prefer educator; many writers insist on teacher. I have no strong
feelings about it, and will use different labels for different situations.
This is not to imply that a practitioner or a member of staff in a
childcare centre does not teach; or that a teacher does not care.
The project for Assessing Children’s Experiences was funded by the
Ministry of Education Research Division, and I thank them for that fund-
ing and for the Ministry’s continued interest and support. I want to thank
the Research Division for permission to use the data from the Final
Report to the Ministry for this book. Many thanks to the practitioners
who contributed to the case studies: Margaret Barclay, Mere Skerrett-
White, Merren Goodison, Wendy Lee, Annette Rush, Sue Zonneveld,
Leigh Williams-Hobbs and Rosina Merry; to Jill Farr, Jane Barron and
Kiri Gould for researcher assistance; and to the practitioners’ families and
children at Ferndale, Grandview, Mt Eden, Akarana, St Andrews, Insoll
Avenue and Constance Colegrove kindergartens, St Marks Community
Crêche, Lintott Childcare Centre, Hamilton Childcare Services Trust
Home-based programme, Te Amokura Kohanga Reo and two Play-
centres (from Waikato and Bay of Plenty Associations), for their obser-
vations and Learning Stories. Able administrative assistance for the
Ministry assessment project was given by Haley Stewart and Janet
Mitchell; and Raewyn Oulton drew the diagrams for the technological
practice project and this book. Corinne Nicholson has provided support
in many many ways, including the process of communicating across the
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xii Assessment in Early Childhood Settings

world with the very consultative and thoughtful editors at Paul Chap-
man and Sage. Additional data for Chapter 3 was provided by the family
of two-year-old Moses. I am grateful to his parents for their collection of
stories. Thank you too to Andrew Barclay, now aged thirteen, and his
mother Margaret Barclay for permission to use in Chapter 2 the transcript
about mathematics that Margaret taped when he was two years old. This
transcript, together with the transcript of Joe and Mark trying to make
sense of pirates and masters of the universe, in Chapter 1, first appeared
in the Australian Journal of Early Childhood, Volume 19, Number 2, 1994.
Darryn’s mother’s Parent’s Voice in Chapter 9 first appeared in R.E.A.L.
magazine, Issue 3, October/November 1999. Assessment data from early
childhood centres collected since the two research projects (the one on
assessment and the one on technological practice) includes, with permis-
sion, the children’s and the practitioners’ real names.
Learning stories from early childhood centres not involved in the
original projects have been mostly collected by professional develop-
ment facilitators. I am especially grateful to Wendy Lee for her assid-
uous and enthusiastic collections, and to the parents, children and
practitioners who have given permission for these to be included in
the book. Many thanks too to the University of Waikato Professional
Development team who have kept me up to date on progress in their
centres as well. I regret that I did not have space to include all the
wonderful assessment stories that came my way. Helen May, Anne
Smith, Val Podmore, Pam Cubey, Anne Hatherly, Bernadette Mac-
artney and Bronwen Cowie have all provided ideas and support dur-
ing joint projects that link to this book; at Harvard in the fall of 1995
David Perkins and Shari Tishman helped me to sharpen my ideas
about dispositions. The writing of the book began in the UK in 1999,
thanks to the leave programme at the University of Waikato and to the
hospitality and friendship of Nomi Rowe Rakovsky, Tina Bruce, Mar-
gie Whalley, Iram Siraj-Blatchford and Guy Claxton; Guy’s contribu-
tion began with our joint paper on the ‘costs of calculation’ in 1989 and
the ideas in the book owe much to our many (southern) summers of
conversations about learning. My colleagues at the University of
Waikato Department of Early Childhood Studies are owed special
thanks too: many of them began this journey with me on the national
Early Childhood Curriculum Development team. And I warmly thank
Malcolm Carr for wise counsel and superb editorial assistance.
Although working with a new curriculum highlighted the challenge
of assessing it, the ideas about learning and assessment that underpin
this book do not depend on any one curriculum. Hermine Marshall
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Preface xiii

describes a school classroom in which the emphasis was on the chal-

lenge of learning:
Motivation for learning (rather than ritually performing the task) was
based on challenge, links to the real world, and student interest. . . .
Errors were not evidence of a poor product, but a way to ‘figure out
what went wrong’ and as a source of new learning. (1992, p. 10)
In thinking about this classroom, Marshall used the term ‘learning
place’. This book writes about the work of early childhood practi-
tioners as they have tried to establish ‘learning places’ for young
children, and to document the learning in them. The first chapter tells
of my shift in understanding about learning and assessment, and sets
out seven assumptions that I used to hold but now find to be problem-
atic. In the assessment project it soon became clear that we could not
proceed with the ‘how’ of assessment until we confronted ‘what’ was
to be assessed (Drummond and Nutbrown, 1992). Elliot Eisner has
commented that what educators say they want to accomplish and how
they evaluate what students have learned are often contradictory
(2000, p. 346). He adds that: ‘Part of the reason for the neglect of more
ambitious aspirations is that it is difficult and time-consuming to se-
cure information relevant to their assessment.’
The second chapter and the three that follow tackle this question of
‘what’ to assess. Chapter 6 asks how the ambitious aspirations of the
previous chapters might be assessed. The next four chapters set out
the way in which the practitioners in the five case study settings, and
some since then, have implemented procedures that attempt to assess
the learning that the teachers, the families and the children value. It
includes the difficulties and the dilemmas. The final chapter takes up
the threads of the earlier chapters to answer two questions that were
posed in Chapter 1 and to add another:
● How can we describe early childhood outcomes in ways that make
valuable statements about learning and progress?
● How can we assess early childhood outcomes in ways that promote
and protect learning?
● How were these educators assisted to make a shift in their thinking
about assessment?
I hope the book will be helpful to student teachers and educators
interested in assessment, and to early childhood practitioners who
have ambitious aspirations for their children and are also contemplat-
ing a journey towards assessing the complex and the uncertain.
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1
A Folk Model of Assessment – and
an Alternative

When I was a beginning kindergarten teacher, twenty years ago, I

believed that assessment was about checking to see whether the
nearly-school-age children had acquired what I considered to be the
requisite skills for school: the list included early writing (writing their
name), self-help skills, early mathematics (counting), turn-taking,
scissor-cutting. I therefore looked out for the gaps in a school-
readiness repertoire, keeping a checklist, and used some direct teach-
ing strategies to do something about them in the months before
school. I did not find the process interesting or helpful to me, but I
certainly saw it as linked to my reputation as a competent early child-
hood teacher with the children’s families and with the local schools.
There are a number of assumptions about assessment here, and
twenty years later I don’t hold any of them. My interest has been
captured by children like four-year-old Emily, an articulate and con-
fident child, who, when her friend Laura tells her that she has done a
jigsaw ‘wrong’, shouts angrily ‘No! Don’t call me wrong. If you call
me wrong I won’t let you stroke my mouse.’ I am intrigued by pro-
cesses in the kindergarten whereby Jason changes the simple activity
of ‘marble-painting’ into a complex and difficult process, teaches Nell
(who normally avoids this kind of difficulty) and then Nell teaches
Jinny and Nick. In one activity in one centre I frequently hear ‘good
girl’ from the adults but I never hear ‘good boy’, although boys are
participating too. I pursue Myra and Molly who are practising a lan-
guage that I have called girl-friend-speak, a language that involves re-
ciprocal and responsive dialogue but appears to exclude Lisa. I
interview Danny about what he finds difficult, and he tells me that it is
drawing the triangular back windows of cars. I read a story to two-
year-old Moses and he puzzles about whether the ducks have feet
under the water, and what kind of feet they are. I hear Trevor advising
his friend that if he finds something difficult he should just leave it.

1
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2 Assessment in Early Childhood Settings

We will meet many of these children again in this book, as I puzzle

about whether there is learning going on both above and ‘under the
water’, what kind of learning it is, how we might assess it, and
whether, as early childhood educators, it is any of our business.
I have called those twenty-year-old ideas of mine about assessment
my ‘folk’ model of assessment. David Olson and Jerome Bruner (1996)
write about ‘folk’ pedagogy as our everyday intuitive theories about
learning and teaching, about what children’s minds are like and how
one might help them learn. They point out that these everyday intui-
tive theories and models reflect deeply ingrained cultural beliefs and
assumptions. In the case of my folk model of assessment, the assump-
tions were about: the purpose for assessment (to check against a short
list of skills that describe ‘competence’ for the next stage of education),
outcomes of interest (fragmented and context-free school-oriented
skills), focus for intervention or attention (the deficits), validity of assess-
ment data (objective observations of skills, reflected in a checklist, are
best), progress (hierarchies of skill, especially in literacy and numer-
acy), procedures (checklists) and value (surveillance of me as a teacher).
I developed these assumptions as I grew up, from my own experience
of teachers and assessment at school and university, from my percep-
tion of the experience of my own children in early childhood settings
and in school, and from the views of my family and peers. Teacher
education had done nothing to shift them.
However, I held that folk model of assessment alongside a very
different and more considered model of learning and teaching. Later,
together with a group of practitioners who wanted to explore some
alternative assessment practices, I had the opportunity to try to integ-
rate our ideas about learning and teaching with a different set of
assumptions about assessment. Table 1.1 lists the assumptions of my
folk model about assessment, and sets alongside them the assump-
tions of an alternative model. These alternative assumptions are out-
lined in this chapter and form the basis for this book.

Purpose
An assumption that I was making twenty years ago was that assess-
ment sums up the child’s knowledge or skill from a predetermined
list. Harry Torrance and John Pryor have described this assumption as
‘convergent’ assessment. The alternative is ‘divergent’ assessment,
which emphasises the learner’s understanding and is jointly accom-
plished by the teacher and the learner. These ideas reflect not only
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A Folk Model of Assessment – and an Alternative 3

Table 1.1. Assumptions in two models of assessment: a folk model and an
alternative

Assumptions about My folk model about An alternative model

assessment
Purpose To check against a short To enhance learning
list of skills that describe
‘competence’ at school
entry
Outcomes of interest Fragmented and context- Learning dispositions
free school-oriented
skills
Focus for intervention Deficit, gap-filling, is Credit, disposition-
foregrounded enhancing, is
foregrounded
Validity Objective observation Interpreted observations,
discussions and
agreements
Progress Hierarchies of skills Increasingly complex
participation
Procedures Checklists Learning stories
Value to practitioners Surveillance by external For communicating with
agencies four audiences: children,
families, other staff and
self (the practitioner)

views about assessment, but views about learning and teaching as

well. I think I was holding a convergent and a divergent view of
learning at the same time. In convergent mode I checked the children’s
achievement against a short list of skills that described ‘competence’ at
school entry. When my checklist indicated a gap in the requisite skills,
I devised ways of directly teaching them. In divergent mode I was
implementing a play-based programme to enhance the learning I val-
ued at this site, but I did not see a role for assessment or documenta-
tion in that.
I don’t have any examples of those convergent assessments.
However, I do have an example of my working in more divergent
mode at that time. Some years after the event I wrote about the inven-
tion by one of the four-year-olds at the kindergarten of an accessible
carpentry drill (Carr, 1987). I had observed one of the children wield-
ing a G-clamp upside down to ‘drill’ a dent in the carpentry table.
Normally a G-clamp has a cap on the end of the thread so that it
doesn’t mark the inside of the table when it is clamped on, but this
clamp had lost the cap, and the thread had a pointed end. He called
out: ‘Look, Margaret, I’m drilling a hole.’ We discussed how he had
transformed a G-clamp into a carpentry drill, and evaluated this
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4 Assessment in Early Childhood Settings

invention as potentially providing an extremely helpful artefact for

enhancing the children’s carpentry. Our drills at that time were of the
egg-beater variety, where children had to keep the drill upright while
they both pressed down and rotated the handle in a vertical plane. In
the new ‘drill’, the thread maintained the pressure while the child
could use both hands to turn the horizontally aligned handle at the
top to drill the hole. I later persuaded a parent to weld a threaded bit
onto the G-clamp, and set it into a block of wood, and it did indeed
enhance the children’s problem-solving and planning processes in
carpentry. I wrote the story of one of the boys making a boat by
drilling two 5mm holes in a block of wood, sawing and hammering in
short lengths of dowel (for masts), and then floating it in the water
trough (it fell to the side; later modifications to the design to get it to
float the right way up were not recorded); and of one of the girls
drilling holes in ‘wheels’ cut from an old broom handle, attaching
them with flat-headed nails to the side of a piece of wood, and pulling
it along as a car or cart. I had taken photos for the families, but it did
not occur to me to write up either the invention or the carpentry as
part of an assessment procedure. I think now that documenting that
learning at the time would have given the children and the families,
and me, some new insights into the goals of our early childhood
programme, and of how they might be recognised and developed in
other activities.
I was therefore only documenting part of the curriculum, and I was
documenting it for an external audience. This may be true for many
early childhood educators, and as demands for external accountability
press more insistently on the profession, surveillance begins to
encroach on intuitive and responsive teaching. The alternative model
tries to connect external accountability and responsive teaching to-
gether: it advocates the documenting of learner outcomes and it is
embedded in episodes of responsive teaching. However, it defines
learner outcomes rather differently from the convergent checklist that
I employed twenty years ago.

Outcomes of Interest
My folk model of documented assessment viewed learning as individ-
ual and independent of the context. Learner outcomes of interest were
fragmented and context-free school-oriented skills. The alternative
model says that learning always takes some of its context with it, and
that, as James Wertsch has suggested, the learner is a ‘learner-in-
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REVISED 17APR01 AT 14:15 BY TF DEPTH: 59.05 PICAS WIDTH 40.05 PICAS

A Folk Model of Assessment – and an Alternative 5

action’. This viewpoint derives mainly from Lev Vygotsky’s (1978)

notion of ‘mediated action’. It takes a view of learning that focuses on
the relationship between the learner and the environment, and seeks
ways to define and document complex reciprocal and responsive rela-
tionships in that environment. Emphasising this view of learning,
Barbara Rogoff (1997, 1998) has described development as the ‘trans-
formation of participation’.
A number of other writers have emphasised the context- and
culture-specific nature of learning. Jerome Bruner (1990, p. 106), for
instance, has described this emphasis as a ‘contextual revolution’ in
psychology. Attention has shifted from internal structures and rep-
resentations in the mind to meaning-making, intention, and relation-
ships in the experienced world. This development is of great interest
to early childhood practitioners. The traditional separation of the indi-
vidual from the environment, with its focus on portable ‘in-the-head’
skills and knowledge as outcome, has been replaced by attaching
social and cultural purpose to skills and knowledge, thereby blurring
the division between the individual and the learning environment.
One way to look at a range of learning outcomes is to describe them as
an accumulation. Table 1.2 sets out four outcomes along an accumu-
lated continuum of complexity.

Table 1.2. Learning outcomes along an acccumulated continuum of complexity

LEARNING OUTCOMES
(i) Skills and knowledge
(ii) Skills and knowledge + intent = learning strategies
(iii) Learning strategies + social partners and practices + tools = situated
learning strategies
(iv) Situated learning strategies + motivation = learning dispositions

Skills and knowledge

The focus here is on skills and knowledge ‘in the head’, acquired by
the learner. In early childhood there are a number of basic routines
and low-level skills that might be, and often are, taught and tested:
cutting with scissors, colouring between the lines, saying a series of
numbers in the correct sequence, knowing the sounds of letters. Often
complex tasks are seen as learning hierarchies with the assumption
that smaller units of behaviour need to be mastered as prerequisites
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