Pedagogy

Americans are need of valuable information pertaining to the well being of their infants and young children. Parents need to know whether their children are ready for school or not. In addition, school administrators and teachers are in need of knowing the effectiveness of their programs and whether the children are being given the correct services and programs. Policymakers are in need of knowing what program guidelines and expenditures will be helpful to children as well as their families and their effectiveness. Yet infants and young children are very difficult to be accurately assessed, and testing efforts have been done in the past with good intention of assessing these children. The main purpose of this research is to enable early childhood educators, policymakers and professionals access their data needs by means of testing young children effectively and appropriately. Goal 1 in the National Education Goal (Wurtz, Kagan and Shepherd L) indicates that all children in US were to be ready to learn and commence school by 2000. The goal aimed at helping those promoting the importance of the needs of children .However, this goal has been very difficult to measure because no good methods or data could be found to assess the children status while they commenced school.  Assessing young children below 8 years of age is difficult since this is the period of high rates of development in motor, linguistic and physical development (Hosterman, 1989). Since young children gain knowledge at rates and means that differ from older children, the assessments must be tailored to suit them accordingly. They lack the experience to comprehend the goals of formal testing, thus resulting to difficulty in structuring testing interactions appropriately.

Description of the tests
Play-Based Assessment Test (PBA)
Play based assessment is an informal test intended for the children aged under six years. It gives a chance for developmental observation of social-emotional, sensor motor, and self-help domains and knowledge (Linder 1993). Language-speech pathologists ,early childhood teachers in special education, incensed  school psychologist ,physical education specialized, physiotherapist, optician, ophthalmologist, together with the parents can help identify the special needs of a child .Dialogue between the team members and parents is very important before and after the assessment. Play based assessment takes place in a natural environment, it is very flexible in testing, the assessment is holistic, each child can be tested, there is connection with the examiner and it provides for accessibility to the parent (Grieve, 1992) .PBA puts emphasis on the strengths of a child as well as the needs of a child. The goal of this test is to relate the childs need to the available intervention. The test can be used to assess the fine motor, gross motor, social and cognitive skills. The test is very effective especially when assessing the development of chronicling children, tailoring activities and programs, planning their accomplishments in a classroom setting to cater for the needs of the children that are rapidly changing.

Nancy Barley was the first person to publish the BSID scales. The scale has extensively been used to test the infants development. Typically, the test is administered between 45-60 minutes on individual basis by clinicians who are experienced and have been trained specifically on the procedures of BSID.  It comprises of items meant for identify infants and young children with the potential of experiencing developmental delays. Children are assessed along three scales using the BSID (Karr, 1998) .The first scale is the mental scale which is used to yield the mental scale index. It also evaluates abilities such as perceptualsensory acuities, response, and discrimination, constancy in acquisition of objects, problem solving and memory learning, verbal communication and vocalization, cause of abstract thinking, mental mapping, habituation, mathematical concept and complex language formation. The second scale is the motor scale which evaluates the ability of body control, control of large muscles, finer skills of manipulating the fingers and hands, postural imitation, stereonosis and dynamic movement. The third and last scale on the BSID is the scale that rates behavior. This scale provides information which can supplement the information received from the motor and mental scales. The thirty item scale is used to rate the relevant behavior of the child, arousal attention, engagementorientation, regulation of the emotions and the quality of the motor.

Standardization Information
In assessing the infants and young children, the tests adhere to the standard information as per the NEG and should benefit the child. Getting information from children is potentially stressful and difficult. The benefit must be very clear to warrant doing an assessment because formal assessments are very expensive and can drain resources meant for other programs (Wurtz, Kagan and Shepherd). The purpose of the assessment should be very precise, fair, valid and reliable for the intended purpose. For instance, assessments focusing on one purpose are not valid. The assessment guidelines should embrace the fact that validity and reliability of the evaluation increases with increase in the Childs age. Children below six years are very difficult to be assessed in terms of cognitive abilities. The assessments must be appropriate to the age in content and data collection methods. Assessment in youngsters must consider the whole range of development and early learning. Development encompasses physical motor development, emotional and social development, general knowledge and cognition. They must embrace the fact that children require contexts that are familiar so that they can demonstrate abilities.

Abstract pencil and paper tasks may be hard for children to elicit what they think they know. Assessment must be appropriate in terms of linguistics bearing in mind the fact that all evaluations lingual measurements. Despite of the assessment being  made for measuring  knowledge on names of color, potential learning or skills in early reading, the results of assessment  are confounded by proficiency in language .This mostly affects children who have not been exposed to English to test their proficiency in English. Lastly a valuable source in evaluation  information including an audience for evaluation results should be parents .Direct measures of children are fallible and evaluations should comprise  evidence from various sources for instance reports from teachers and  parents. Results of the evaluation should be conveyed to the parents because they belong to the ongoing process which includes them in their childrens education. (Wurtz E, Kagan S. and Shepherd L).

Test Protocol
Before administering the BSID test, the evaluator gives details of the test procedure to the parent. The main aim of this explanation is to give the examiner to develop a focused link with the child on and during the whole procedure. This is to avoid distracting the attention from the infant or young child to the parent in the processes of testing. Parents are on the other hand instructed not to engage their children in conversation during the testing. For the play based assessment the assessment is conducted in a way that the information is collected through observation, for instance data is collected through interview with past teachers or  parents and also by use of tests constructed by teachers.(weis)

Reliability and validity of the tests
Specialists in early child development and educators have embraced the fact that early years are unique. Informal assessments such as the play based assessment are a characteristic in the field of early childhood. Early teachers have noted and recorded the behavior of children in a natural way like observing the children in environments which are very natural as the children involve in their daily activities. This innovative system has attracted attention to the practitioners. This is because the technique is based on the strengths of the child. The test is more flexible compared to the BSID test. It therefore goes without doubt that the test is best suited for testing the children with disabilities. Most of the practitioners have embarked on using this type of assessment yet little publication has been done on the same (Malone, Stoneman  Langone 1994) to show the validity of the test in testing for the cognitive development of a child.

Research however establishes that parents and professionals can have a positive perception on the assessment of their children. Despite the fact that little publications on the use of TPBA is available, professionals have increasingly been interested in this test (Lamony and Eisert, 1996). PBA and BSID have been said to significantly correlate (Karr, 1998). Karr carried out a study on children with normal development and she did a comparison of the result on the BSID and PBA .In spite of the criticism, BSID still dominates the assessments in early childhood. Off late there has been an upsurge in formal testing and assessment of children for instance use of BSID. The information has been used to come up with outrageous conclusions like tracking children in to low and high ability groups, retaining or mislabeling them, sorting them out of or in to preschools and kindergarten .In a number of cases the tool designed for a certain purpose or a certain age group of youngsters has not been applied correctly to other group. This has resulted to a lot of schools identifying the children as not being ready or too immature kindergarten and group setting respectfully .Very many children especially boys who for instance given an opportunity would benefit greatly in those setting. (Wurtz, Kagan and Shepherd) BSID-II is a technique of assessment of young children that is standardized and it is often used to assess the level of cognitive functioning in young children. The aim of using this test is to help reach the first goal of NEG. It evaluates the eligibility of education biased to special programs. BSID is important because it is highly reliable, and it provides normative valid data. The motor and mental scales have correlation coefficients of 0.77 and 0.83 respects on test retest reliability.  This test on the other hand has received criticism (Linder, 1993). The test involves the use of procedures that are standardized which are foreign to the children especially the use of unappealing and unfamiliar environment, new examiner, new instructions on how to perform some tasks and also an interrogative session in which a children may have little ability or experience. To maintain these procedures the evaluators are restricted to administrative procedures which are dictated in testing manual. The test does not adhere to the needs of the disabled children. The test however has very poor predictive value with the exception of instances when the scores are very low. It is a good screening tool for locating children who need early intervention.

Parents play an important role in assessment of the early childhood education. Since parents are familiar with the behavior of their children, their evaluation can be more related to the status of development of their children than an evaluation which relies on unique clinical testing. Their involvement in the childrens development testing promotes their knowledge on the issues concerning the development of their children. The parents have a responsibility of developing a concrete foundation of education for there children.(Harvard family) Teachers and early childhood specialized must come up with strategies to help develop a relationship with the parents so that they carry out the assessments. The first strategy is participation. The staff must ensure that parents are actively involved in matters concerning the assessments .For instance the staff is entitled to providing a welcoming environment in the childhood setting which will initiate a relationship with the parent. Most of the times the early childhood professionals tend to focus on the child than the parent (Lamony and Eisert, 1996). The second item to be looked at under participation is family context. The foremost thing that parents consider when taking their children to an early education centre is safety. Parents must develop trust in the staff and also have a feeling that their desires, wishes and needs can be listened to. This will help develop a caring relationship between the staff and the parents. The second strategy is dialogue. Dialogue requires that the protocols of testing are clearly explained to the parents for their cooperation. The early education educators must be active in sharing information with the parents.
Information is very vital and parents must have the information on the childrens development at various stages. Parents are eager to have information on reading, brain research, and when to get their children to kindergarten. Early childhood educators must encourage to inquire on the whereabouts of their children and by doing so they will help build a relationship with the parents.(Wurtz E, Kagan S. and Shepherd L) The third strategy which educators can use to build a relationship with the parents is by turning problems in opportunities. Teachers can use problems encountered by the children by calling in the parents and talking to them on their childrens development. This will enhance and promote relationship between the parents and the teachers.

In conclusion assessing children is very difficult yet each child needs to be examined closely for both social and cultural differences. The evaluator has a big responsibility to the child and the parent to make the assessment a success. Since assessment plays a big role in the todays society in testing children for mental retardation, school readiness and neurological impairment, it is important that the evaluator follows testing protocols efficiently and properly. Assessing children is very demanding and therefore consent must be sought from the childrens parents, this therefore calls for all the results concerning the process of testing are explained to the parents carefully for their cooperation.