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 Contribution – Aromatawai mō te Mana Tangata

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 Contribution/Mana Tangata.

  • Children are provided with opportunities to contribute to their own assessments
  • Children have formative assessments that they can “read” and comment on
  • Group assessments illustrate children’s developing skills and dispositions to initiate, maintain, and enjoy relationships with other children
  • Continuity of assessments over time illustrates individual and personalised learning trajectories or journeys that have developed from the children’s particular interests and intentions, the teachers’ interests and intentions (including Te Whāriki), the available resources and activities, the opportunities that children are given to take responsibility for their own learning, the expectations of competence for all learners, the community of learners that exists at the early childhood setting, and the funds of knowledge and dispositions that the children bring from home and elsewhere
  • The curriculum and the assessment documentation include funds of knowledge3 about difference and diversity, with the goal of children learning to relate positively in diverse groups
  • Teachers note, recognise as valuable, record, respond to, and revisit episodes in which children question the status quo and offer thoughtful alternatives.