Kei Tua o te Pae

Kei Tua o te Pae/Assessment for Learning: Early Childhood Exemplars is a best-practice guide that will help teachers continue to improve the quality of their teaching.

The exemplars are a series of books that will help teachers to understand and strengthen children's learning. It also shows how children, parents and whānau can contribute to this assessment and ongoing learning.

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Book 4: Children contributing to their own assessment – Ngā huanga tamariki ki tō rātou aromatawai

Introduction - He kupu whakataki

Te Whāriki affirms the view of Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) that  “Learning and development are facilitated by the participation of the developing person in progressively more complex patterns of reciprocal activity” (page 60) and by gradual “shifts in the balance of power” (page 212) from the teacher to the learner.  These shifts reflect children’s increasing ability and inclination to steer their own course, set their own goals, assess their own achievements, and take on some of the responsibility for learning. 

Traditionally, the balance of power between teacher and child during assessment has been very one-sided.  The teacher writes the assessment, makes an interpretation, and perhaps discusses it with other teachers and the family, but the child has not usually been part of the process.  The exemplars in this book show how a number of early childhood settings in Aotearoa New Zealand are now finding ways to include children’s voices in assessment.

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