Measuring / Assessing “the whole child”
In order to view young children
holistically, I believe that the following measurement or assessment should be
carried out: 1) Naturalistic assessment: where all those who interact with the
child on a regular basis watch the child at play or gives the child a direct
test in various environments to bring out the variations in the social
interactive behaviour of the child. 2)
Focused assessment: this is obtain behaviours usually displayed within a
familiar context. 3) Performance
assessment: This is necessary in order to allow chidren display their knowledge
and apply it, e.g. telling story, climbing a ladder, etc (Notari-Syverson and
Losardo). 4) Dynamic assessment: this is to weigh an
independent performance of the childin relation to dependent performance in
order to determine the learning potential and responsivity to instructions in
the child (Notari-Syverson and
Losardo). 5) Curriculum based language assessment: this
is used to discover and study the gaps between the actual curricular context
and the child’s competence. This will
equally show the corrective measures necessary, where and how needed. These are carried along with whatever
measure/assessment already in place.
These will be used on individual basis with models adopted to suit the
child that is being assessed. (Notari-Syverson and
Losardo). In Nigeria, for example, the school-age
children are assessed on general current affairs, aptitude test and skills
assessment. These are done to know the speed
at which the child can learn and how easy learning is for the child.
Additionally, some children are
good in all except in linguistical expression, this should have been taken care
of if such children were correctly assessed – the challenge would have been
detected and corrected before then.
Reference
Berger, K.
S. (2009). The developing person through childhood (5th ed.). New York,
NY: Worth Publishers.
