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 7: Assessment for learning: Continuity – Te aromatawai me te ako: Motukore

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 [emphasis added]."

Early Childhood Learning and Assessment Exemplar Project
Advisory Committee and Co-ordinators, 2002

This book is about one of the purposes and consequences of documented assessment in early childhood education. 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 third of these: continuity. Early childhood learning communities support and construct continuity by:

  • documenting “work in progress”;
  • revisiting portfolios, folders, and files;
  • building on prior knowledge, past experience, and current ability;
  • suggesting what the next step might be;
  • telling stories about the past;
  • passing on knowledge and skills to others;
  • developing, over time, some characteristics of “what we do here”;
  • commenting on connections across time and place;
  • looking back in order to look forward.

In this section