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.

We are making improvements to our download-to-print functionality. So if you want a printed copy there are PDF versions available at the bottom of the main cover page.

The quality of assessment in early childhood education – ERO(external link)

Assessment for Well-being – Aromatawai mō te Mana Atua

The exemplars in this book illustrate possible ways in which assessing, documenting, and revisiting children’s learning will contribute to educational outcomes in the curriculum strand Well-being/Mana Atua.

  • Assessments secure the responsible and thoughtful involvement of all children (for very young children, photographs of learning episodes can be revisited, and families will provide a proxy involvement for their children).
  • Assessments reveal the nature of the teacher’s belief about learning and determine their commitment to “teaching through interaction to develop each pupil’s power to incorporate new facts and ideas into his or her understanding”.2
  • Portfolios become artefacts of well-being, signifying the competence of the learners and celebrating learning identities in a spirit of “appreciative inquiry”.3
  • Opportunities for children to discuss health, emotional well-being, and safety are provided by revisiting assessment episodes that relate to these topics.
  • Teaching about health, emotional well-being, and safety, when included in the assessment record, enhances the reader’s knowledge in this area.
  • Documentation provides all teachers with information about a child’s well-being cues, enhancing sensitive and well-informed relationships between teachers and children.
  • Portfolios document children’s well-being journeys, including their strengthening confidence in a range of areas while suggesting possible ways forward for teachers, families, whānau, and children.