A Note of Thanks and Support

First I would like to thank God who is the head of my life. Then I would like to thank my colleagues for sharing their experiences which have strengthened my understanding about a lot of things. Also, thanks for all of the comments and insights on my discussions. It helped me to hear the views of others so that I coukld see different views of certain topics. I feel like I gave my colleages the same things  such as great feedback on discussions and blogs.  I wish all of my colleagues nothing but success in their future endeavors. I wish them all to become future leaders in the early childhood field.

I would also like to thank my professor who was also great and very helpful with whatever questions or issues that I had. Walden couldn't have had any better professors and I'm glad to be apart of this University.


Quotes

"Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children."
Charles R. Swindoll
"Life, love, and laughter - what priceless gifts to give our children."
Phyllis Dryden

Testing for Intelligence

In early childhood,  children should be assessed but not measured on their ability to do something.  I feel that they should be assessed on the five developmental domains which are fine motor, gross motor, social/emotional, language and cogntive. I also feel that the satndarized test are good to see what a child knows but it shouldn't determine big milestones in a child's life such as graduation or entering college. A test doesn't always your abilities and strengths. Someone may be a good test taker and another person may not be. For example, in high school my daughter was a student who made A's and B's and my niece was a student who made A's, B's, C's and D's. She was a very non caring person when it came to taking a standarized test and my daughter was nervous during that time. They both took the GHSGT which is the Georgia High School Graduation Test and my niece passed all of her test. my daughter didn't pass Science or Social Studies. This is an example of good test takers and bad test takers. My daughter currently has test anxiety and she gets nervous when taking a timed test.

School-aged children are assessed all over the world and the country that I'm interested in getting information about is Japan. In Japan, children are assessed and measured in school. The focus of Japanese parents and teachers is to prepare students for two important tests: one at the end of ninth grade, which determines whether a student goes to a vocational school, a first-rate public college-preparatory high school, a second rate high school or an expensive private school; and another at the end of the 12th grade to gain entrance to university. This is similar to the schools in the US.  Also, national achievement tests are given to primary school sixth graders and third year middle school students. In some cases, the test require students to not only give an answer but their calculations.

When it comes to children being assessed,  one of my big concerns is giving the smaller children test. When they are four to eight years old, I feel that they don't understand how important it is when comes to taking standardized tests so it shouldn't be measured.

Reference:

http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=830&catid=23&subcatid=150