For the Love of Learning: The Importance of Alternative Assessments in Education

Introduction

    According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC) developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) position paper (1997) detailing how to assess children’s learning and development, assessment “recognizes individual variation in learners and allows for differences in styles and rates of learning” (p. 14) and “decisions...such as enrollment or placement are never made on the basis of a single assessment or screening device, but are based on multiple sources of relevant information...” (p. 14).
    While many teachers aspire to achieve such a holistic and individualistic view of a child’s learning, 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA)  has created an enveloping and invasive standardized testing environment which necessarily tunnels an early childhood educator’s vision, from kindergarten readiness in preschool to the actual test administration commencement in third grade. The cost of this ever-earlier pressure manifests itself as a direct and often schizophrenic tension between policy-makers’ goals for public education and teachers’ hopes for their individual students (Hargreaves, Earl, and Schmidt, 2002).
    As a result, children are “taught to the test” in order to receive state money. Funding, which is often the “high stakes” in high stakes testing, cannot compensate for what else is at stake: the children’s (and teacher’s) love and desire for lifelong learning and participation (Kohn, 1999). If true joy of the learning process is lost, the newest, most aesthetically beautiful school building in the US won’t buy it back. This brief paper attempts to explore why standardized testing is largely ineffective as an assessment, how the focus on testing and results harms true learning, and how DAP-informed childhood educators can help our nation’s schools through alternative assessments.

The Need for Alternative Assessments: Re-creating the Bar

     The first question one must ask when designing assessments is, “What is [the assessment] measuring?” (Kohn, 1999). For the state standardized tests required by No Child Left Behind, the answer is students’ “command of foundational processes” in math, reading, and science content areas (Noddings, 2005). The standardized, preferred way to show said command is by simply filling in bubbles. Experts agree that such superficial displays of learning encourage shallow understanding and application soon forgotten after the test (Kohn, 1999; NAEYC, 1997). Indeed, the product vs. process-oriented nature of these tests make students focus on the possible reward of high scores and lose interest in the process they experience in order to obtain those numbers (Kohn, 1993). State scores may indeed increase, but the purpose, to show “command” (defined as thorough understanding) of the information in our democratic and increasingly international society, isn’t fulfilled (Noddings, 2005). Thus, the raised bar and increased scores become meaningless.
    In order to stimulate students’ complex, sometimes messy, and meaningful understanding of concepts and facts, early childhood educators must draw upon research which states that children acquire a deeper understanding of the world through active, child-centered participation rather than a “didactic, teacher-centered approach to learning” (Rushton and Larkin, 2001). Assessing such multi-dimensional learning can prove to be a task itself, but, with some training, alternative assessments such as portfolios; observations; modified checklists (with space for comments); and projects can provide a more complete, realistic, and culturally sensitive view of children. Factors such as multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983), socio-economic status, and race are considered; children’s self-esteem and confidence increase as their learning styles and rates are accepted by the teacher (NAEYC, pp. 5-9).