Assessment in Early Childhood

According to Ann Landers, it is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. The subject of children’s achievement and performance in school, and even before school, has received increasing public attention during the latter 1980s and early 1990s. Over the years educators has seek various methods of assessment to evaluate students. According to Pett, (1990), educators use the term Authentic Assessment to define the practice of realistic student involvement in evaluation of their own achievement. One method of Authentic Assessment is to assemble and review a portfolio of the child’s work. Venn, (2000), stated that portfolio is a systematic collection of students work and related materials that depicts a student’s activities, accomplishment and achievement in one or more areas of the curriculum.
In this era performance assessment related to the monitoring of students’ mastery of a core curriculum, portfolios can enhance the assessment process by revealing a range of skills and understandings of young children in Early Childhood Education. The wide use of portfolio can stimulate a shift in classroom practices and education polices. According to Meisels and Steele (1991), portfolios enable children to participate in assessing their own work, keep track of individual children’s progress and provide a basis for evaluating the quality of individual children’s overall performance.
There are many benefits of using portfolios in the early childhood classroom. Portfolio assessment has become widely used in educational settings as a way to examine and measure children’s progress, by documenting the process of learning or changes as it occurs. For example if parents feel the need to evaluate their child’s progress in the classroom; the portfolio will be available for this purpose. Hence, with the aid of the teacher and evidence of their child’s portfolio parent will have an understanding of