Practices and Challenges of Children’s Learning Assessment in Pre-school Centers

The purpose this study was to investigate practices and challenges assessing children in pre-school centers. In the study, 66 teachers participated from government and non-government pre-school centers. To collect data, questionnaire, interview and observation guide were used. The quantitative data was analyzed through frequency, percentage, and mean and the qualitative data was analyzed thematically. Findings show that educators hold diverse views and have varying approaches to assessment, using different tools and methods. All participants agree that assessment is important for supporting children’s learning and development.The findings revealed that poor curriculum implementation and instruction, unfair assessment practices such as unhealthy comparison among children, labelling children as failures by emphasizing on norm, using paper-pencil tests, focusing on few domains of children’s development, using the assessment result for promotion, and a possible wrong interpretation of assessment results. Moreover, poor documentation of learning activities of the children, using few assessment tools throughout the semester and summative assessment approaches, poor parent communication and feedback provision were common problems in the majority of preschool centres. Lack of professional staff, lack of ECCE syllabus, large class size, and lack of knowledge and skill were the major challenges.


INTRODUCTION
Assessment of young children must be very different than that of older students. Young children are learning how to communicate and are able to show what they know by doing, rather than by taking a pencil-and-paper test. They have not yet mastered the skills of reading and writing. Assessment of young children needs to include developmentally appropriate activities. It should not include a multiple-choice test, or other formal assessments.
The Ethiopian curriculum planners and the entire MoE appear to have agreed on the essential role of teachers in curriculum implementation and the very informal nature of assessment in Ethiopian kindergartens. However, how many times do, teachers, as the implementers of the curriculum, reflect on the assessment carried out on children's performance? How could it be that make a very well informed decision that provides for every child in classrooms irrespective of the varying special needs? How can we assess the performance of an armless child who cannot write owing to such a physical challenge in Ethiopian pre-school context? and etc. Many issues can be raised related to assessment practices in pre-school centres. Hence, as a drop of water in the ocean and filling the knowledge gap in the area, the study addressed the following research questions: i) How do teachers practice child assessment in pre-school classrooms? ii) How far is the ECCE curriculum available in pre-school centres? iii) What are the challenges of assessing pre-school children?

METHODOLOGY Study Design
Both qualitative and quantitative methods (mixed) design were used in the study. Mixed methods research is a research design (methodology) in which the researcher collects, analyzes, and integrates both quantitative and qualitative data in a study.

Participants
In the study, 12 pre-school centres found in Jigjiga were selected from all sectors (private, government, and faith based) through stratified sampling. Then 60 pre-school teachers were selected through simple random sampling. Moreover, six preschool teachers were selected through purposive sampling. In order to observe the classroom environment and availability of necessary ECCE related documents, 12 pre-school classrooms were selected from all government, private and faith-based pre-school centres.

Instruments
Based on the literature reviewed, the researchers prepared items consisting of 17 items under four dimensions: Teachers assessment practice (4 items); Feedback provision and communication (3 items); Facilitating children's development through assessment (8 items); Program assessment (9 items). Each of which was evaluated by a fourpoint Likert-type scale: (1) Not applicable (2) Not met (3) Partially met (4) Fully met. Observation checklist in 'Yes' or 'No' format was also used in the study. It consists of 9 items focusing on availability of ECCE curriculum, recorded documents of each student, lesson plans, communication books, and etc. Moreover, to dig out detailed information about their assessment practices, 12 interview guide questions were prepared for pre-school teachers.

Data Analysis
The goal of data analysis is to describe accurately what happened in the data. Once the data collection process is completed, the data was cleaned prior data analysis. Then, the quantitative data was analyzed through percentage and mean. In addition, qualitative data was analized thematically.

Availability of Relevant ECCE Related Documents
Regarding ECCE documents, results of the observation guide revealed (as shown in the chart below)that the majority (75%) of observed pre-school centres do not have copies of the preschool curriculum and syllabus (83%) at hand. With regard to children's progress report, only 25% of preschool centres had documented record. When we look at documented commentaries, 67% of the observed preschool centres had no communication book and moreover 58% of them did not communicate the assessment result with parents. And children's learning activities were not documented well. In relation to the lesson plan, in the majority of preschool centres, teachers lesson plan did not incorporate the three domains of development, and activities that promote children's exploration. Furthermore, teachers' assessment techniques were not continuous and fail to address all aspects of development. Although an interviewee from a private owned pre-school centre mention "my lesson plan and activities touch all domains of development like cognitive, affective and psychomotor", the researchers observed that her lesson plan incorporated only the cognitive aspects of development mainly focusing on acquisition of basic skills of language and numeracy.

Assessment Practice in Pre-school
Pre-school teachers' assessment techniques and approaches were measured through questionnaire with four-point scale: Not applicable (1), Not Met (2), Partially Met (3) and Fully Met (4). The mean value of assessment method was found 1.53 (SD=0.53) and the lowest mean score in this domain was found from teachers' use of assessment information to provide specific intervention (see Table 1). The percent distribution of assessment practice shown that, 63% of teachers observe children's learning and development, and documented. Furthermore, implementing different continuous assessment techniques to measure students progress was met partially in half (55%) of observed preschool centres. But in the remaining 45% of preschool centres, the practice of using anecdotal record, and portfolio was unknown. Supporting this, an interviewee said "Academic achievement of preschool students is well recorded in roster by the head teacher. However other types of child activities like play, gross motor activities, fine-motor activities, child's social interaction and other activities have no formal records at school." 1.528 Concerning the purpose of assessment almost all interviewees use the assessment result to determine students progression from grade to grade. Supporting this, an interviewee said "The major purpose of my assessment is to know or classify clever and better doing students from the dull or lower performers. I assess them through either mid or final exams."

Practices of Feedback Provision and Communication of Assessment Result
In relation with assessment reporting, the cumulative mean value of the practice was found 1.39 (SD=0.73) which was below the expected mean value (see Table 2). 63% of preschool teachers were not using progress card and other developmental checklist to report children's progress. The practice of maintaining portfolio of all children was not implemented in 65% of preschool centres. Similarly, 64% of respondents did not use different methods to communicate children's progress with their parents.

Practices of Facilitating Children's Development through Assessment
Regarding the practices of facilitating children's development through assessment, Table 3 below show that the cumulative mean values was 1.71 (SD= 0.67) and which was above the expected mean value. The highest mean value (2.59) and the lowest mean value (1.20) for teachers' mode of assessment to meet parents' expectation and conduct periodic observation of children respectively. Table 3 also show that the practice of periodic observation to make decisions about children was not met in 61% of preschool centres. In 52% of preschool centres, teachers did not plan activities based on the performance of level of children. The majority (78%) of teachers' assessment techniques were just to meet the expectations of school leader. On the other hand, the practice of assessing students' progress based on the curriculum or syllabus was not found in 62% of preschool centres.

Challenges of Assessing Pre-school Children
In describing the challenges of assessing children in preschool classroom, teachers raised many related issues such as large number of students per classroom and shortage of time to conduct other types of assessment techniques, lack of knowledge and skill about assessment in preschool education, low parental involvement and unresponsiveness to their children's education. Concerning this, an interviewee from government pre-school centre expressed her testament.

CNCLUSIONS
Curriculum and assessment should be based on knowledge of theories of learning and child development with attention given to children's needs and interests. The findings revealed that poor curriculum implementation and instruction, unfair assessment practices such as unhealthy comparison among children, labelling children as failures by emphasizing on norm, focusing few domains of children's development, using the assessment result for promotion, and wrong interpretation of assessment results were common in most pre-schools. Moreover, poor documentation of learning activities of the children, using few assessment tools throughout the semester and summative assessment approaches were common problems in the majority of preschool centres. Many scientific researches shown that assessment can be used to facilitating children's development. Lack of periodic observation of children's progress, lack of ECCE syllabus while developing the assessment tools, ignoring the performance level of children during instructional planning were also observed in most pre-school centres. Further more in many of pre-school centres pre-school teachers/caregivers did not share strengths of the children with parents and identify areas of improvement on a regular basis. Program review is very important to know how it can be improved for better learning outcomes of children. However, annual review of program was not done in most of pre-school centres.
The implication for this situation is that the teachers were not following emerging theories and the national ECCE curriculum principles governing childhood assessment practices in line with developmentally appropriate practices. This possible effect is that it will result in misappropriation of assessment on these children and as such it will result in poor curriculum implementation and alignment in the pre-schools.
In the national syllabus and other documents it is clearly illustrated in pre-school teachers' use of assessment tools that note children's developmental achievements and milestones, undertaking the responsibility of bringing children to 'the next step' of development, and their concern for children who manifest a serious gap with their expected skills. At the same time, educators also took into account each child's distinctive characteristics, building assessment practice from 'where the child is at,' his or her capabilities and current understanding (Dunphy, 2008).