Ways of Assessing Children and Curriculum

This book is a response to the increasingly widespread practice of administering standardized tests to preschool and primary-grade children. Such tests are often misused and fail to measure many significant aspects of children’s growth and learning. Here, Celia Genishi and her colleagues present teachers’ alternative ways to meet the need for the assessment of young children.

The stories in the central chapters provide a fascinating look at the ways these teachers document the development of children from diverse cultural backgrounds in varied contexts, including: Play-oriented • Bilingual, and Foxfire classrooms. The alternative ways of assessing, some traditional and some novel, include Observing • Note-taking • Role-playing, and keeping portfolios of children’s work over time.

“Invaluable for preservice and inservice teachers and should be used by teacher educators in instructional strategies courses.”

—Childhood Education

“All who peruse these portrayals . . . should begin to see why several of the current trends in educational assessment, including the pressure for more standardized testing, are shortsighted and quite possibly harmful.”
—Philip W. Jackson, University of Chicago