Documentation and Assessment of Young Children's Learning

Jacqueline Jones

Educational Testing Service

Princeton, NJ

This symposium is intended to provide the audience with the rationale and a series of strategies for documenting and analyzing young children’s science understandings. Principles and recommendations for appropriate early childhood assessment will be discussed, and a documentation/assessment 5-stage cycle for identifying, collecting, interpreting, and applying the classroom-based evidence of young children’s science learning will be described. The following questions will guide the discussion:

· What are effective classroom-based strategies that can be used to document young children's emerging science understandings?

· How does the process of documentation enhance teachers' understanding of young children's science learning?

· How does the process of documentation enhance teachers' reflection on their teaching practices?

Participants will view records of children’s conversations and samples of children’s drawings and constructions. The work is based on findings from a series of projects that were funded by the US National Science Foundation.