The Whole Child: Effective Ways To Measure Minds And Abilities

For week 6-class 2 of my Early Childhood Development Course we had to read about and discuss school age children and their development.  After reading the articles and different chapters and watching select videos, we had to ponder and respond to the following questions:

• Considering a commitment to viewing young children holistically (i.e., a commitment to “the whole child”), what, if anything, do you believe should be measured or assessed? Explain your reasoning.

My personal opinion is that EVERY THING, about a child should be looked at measured and assessed.  Children although they share certain attributes, they each have different talents, abilities and/or mental skills.  And children also vary in the way they show these skills.  For example a child may not test well on paper tests but do excellent when taking more of a verbal type of test.  A child may be stronger in a cognitive domain than a biosocial or psychosocial domain, or vice versa.  A child simply could have a logical/mathematical type of intelligence or maybe the child is stronger biosocially and has a bodily-kinesthetic type of intelligence.  So I feel when we view a young child we need to look at the whole child and we need to take every thing we [realistically] can, into consideration.

• In what ways are school-age children assessed in other parts of the world? (Choose a country or region of the world for which you have a personal affinity.)

Certain Scandinavian countries start school later on at about age 6 or 7.  They believe that starting school later on will help with a child's developmental and social domains.  Once a child meets the school age and is in school they are assessed much the same way US children are.  If something seems a little off or odd, the child is interviewed and or tested for different things.  SIDEBAR - I did have the websites that I visited listed here, unfortunately my computer shut down and the websites weren't saved in my history.  But if you google assessing scandinavian children and hollistic assesments of school age children you should run across the same information.

• What additional ideas, comments, suggestions, examples, and/or concerns related to assessing young children would you like to share with your colleagues?

The only additional thing I would like to share with my fellow colleagues is get on the Internet and read more scholarly articles on this subject.  If we're able to open our mind to the wondrous possibilities of everything a child is capable of instead of placing them in a pre-fashioned box, the child can end up better off.  We can help equip that child with so much more!