Assessment for learning
Te aromatawai mō te akoranga

Noticing, recognising, and responding

In this project, assessment for learning is described as “noticing, recognising, and responding”. This description comes from Bronwen Cowie’s work on assessment in science classrooms (2000). It was useful to the teachers in her study, and early childhood teachers have found it useful as well. These three processes are progressive filters. Teachers notice a great deal as they work with children, and they recognise some of what they notice as “learning”. They will respond to a selection of what they recognise.

Mary Jane Drummond’s (1993) definition of assessment can be adapted to add more to this description of assessment for learning:

[the] ways in which, in our everyday practice, we [children, families, teachers, and others] observe children’s learning [notice], strive to understand it [recognise], and then put our understanding to good use [respond].

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The difference between noticing and recognising is the application of professional expertise and judgments. In particular, a powerful role for exemplars is to help teachers to recognise some of what they notice as learning (that is, to develop their ability to recognise learning). Sometimes recognising the learning occurs in retrospect, some time after the event. However, if there is a time gap between noticing and recognising, the teacher can’t act (respond) in the moment. The exemplars have been published to assist with closing the gap so that many more responses will be immediate and professional and all members of the learning community will be better able to notice, recognise, and respond to children’s learning.

The early childhood exemplar books use the term “assessment for learning”. Many writers call this “formative assessment”. Philippe Perrenoud (1991) says that “Any assessment that helps the pupil [child] to learn and develop is formative” and adds:

Development and learning depend on countless factors that are often interrelated. Any assessment that helps to optimise one or more of these factors, to however small a degree, can be considered formative.

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Perrenoud includes children’s motivation, their social identities as learners, their views about learning, and the learning atmosphere among these “countless factors”.

One important connection between assessment and learning is feedback. Research tells us that feedback to learners improves learning. Some of this feedback will be through documentation (such as assessments that families and teachers can read back to children and photographs that children can “read” themselves). Some of it will be verbal. Some will be non-verbal (through a gesture, a nod, or a smile). Feedback tells the learners what outcomes are valued in the learning community and how they are doing, and it acknowledges the goals that children set for themselves.

Teachers share stories as well as feedback, and this enriches their noticing, recognising, and responding. A teacher in a childcare centre, discussing the sharing of stories at a team meeting, commented, “We’ve followed on. Jackie did one, and then from reading hers, Sheryl saw something happen and was able to follow it up.”