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 5: Assessment and learning: Community – Te aromatawai me te ako: Hapori

Introduction - He kupu whakataki

"Exemplars are examples of assessments that make visible learning that is valued so that the learning community (children, families, whānau, teachers, and beyond) can foster ongoing and diverse learning pathways."

Early Childhood Learning and Assessment Exemplar Project Advisory
Committee and Co-ordinators, 2002 (emphasis added)

Exemplar books 5, 6, and 7 ask the question: “What difference does assessment make to children’s learning?” These exemplar books are about the purposes and consequences of documented assessment in early childhood.1 We know that feedback to children makes a difference to their learning. What difference does documented assessment make? The exemplars collected for the Exemplar Project suggest that documented assessments can make a difference to:

  • community: inviting the participation of children, families, whānau, teachers, and beyond;
  • competence: making visible the learning that is valued;
  • continuity: fostering ongoing and diverse pathways.

This book is about the first of these: community. Documented assessments can invite people to participate in a particular learning community designed to foster children’s learning.

In this section

1 Exemplar books 5, 6, and 7 owe much to a position paper written for the Exemplar Project (Carr and Cowie, 2003). They also draw from a paper presented to the NZCER Annual Conference (Carr et al., 2001).