Season 3 | Episode 13 – Assessment in the Early Years - Guest: Shelly Scheafer

Assessment in the Early Years
Guest: Shelly Scheafer

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 13

Mike:
How is the work of assessing young children different from assessing students in upper elementary grades or in grades six through 12? And what actions can we take to ensure we understand our youngest learners' thinking? Today we're talking with Shelly Schafer, senior manager of Content Development with the math Learning Center about the ways educators can understand and advance the mathematical thinking of our youngest learners. Welcome to the podcast, Shelly. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Shelly:
Thank you, Mike, for having me.

Mike:
So I'd like to start with this question. What makes the work of assessing younger children, particularly students in grades K through two, different from assessing students in upper elementary grades or even beyond?

Shelly:
Wow, there's a lot to that question, Mike. I think there's some obvious things. So effective assessment of our youngest learners is different because obviously our pre-K, our first, even our second grade students are developmentally different from fourth and fifth graders. So when we think about assessing these early primary students, we need to use appropriate assessment methods that match their stage of development. For example, when we think of typical paper pencil assessments and how we often ask students to show their thinking with pictures, numbers and words. Our youngest learners, our just starting to connect symbolic representations to mathematical ideas, let alone put letters together to make words. So we need to take into consideration that primary students are in the early stages of development with their language, their reading, and their writing skills. And this makes it challenging for them to fully articulate, write, sketch, any of their mathematical thinking.
So we often find that with young children, interviews can be really helpful, but even then there's some drawbacks. Some children find it challenging to show in the moment what they know. Others just aren't fully engaged or interested because you've called them over from something that they're busy doing, or maybe they're not yet comfortable with the setting or even the person doing the interview. So when we work within children, we need to recognize all of these little peculiarities that come with working with that age. We also need to understand that their mathematical development is fluid, it's continually evolving, and this is why they often or some may respond differently to the same prompter question, especially if the setting of the context has changed. We may find that a kindergarten student who counts to nine on Monday may count to 69 or even a hundred later in the week, depending on what's going on in their mind at the time.
So this means that assessment with young children needs to be frequent, formative, and ongoing. So we're not necessarily waiting for the end of the unit to see, aha, did they get this? What do we do? We're looking at their work all of the time. And fortunately, some of the best assessments on young children are the observations in their natural setting, like times when maybe they're playing a math game or working with a center activity or even during just your classroom routines. And it's these authentic situations that we can look at as assessments help us capture a more accurate picture of their abilities because we not only get to hear what they say or see what they write on paper, we get to watch them in action. We get to see what they do when they're engaged in small group activities or playing games with friends.

Mike:
So I want to go back to something you said and the way that you said it. You were talking about watching or noticing what students can do and you really emphasize the words. Do talk a little bit about what you were trying to convey with that Shelly

Shelly:
Young children are doers when they work on a math pass, they show their thinking and their actions with finger formations and objects. And we can see if a student has one-to-one correspondence when they're counting, if they group their objects, how they line 'em up, do they tag them? Do they move them as they count them? They may not always have the verbal skills to articulate their thinking, but we can also attend to things like head nodding, finger counting, and even how they cluster or match objects. I'm going to give you an example. Let's say that I'm watching some early first graders and they're solving the expression six plus seven, and the first student picks up a number rack, and if you're not familiar with a number rack, it's a tool with two rows of beads. And on the first row there are five red beads and five white beads.
And on the second row there's five red