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)

Family and community – Whānau tangata

"Families should be part of the assessment and evaluation of the curriculum as well as of children’s learning and development."

Te Whāriki, page 30

Sociocultural approaches to assessment:

  • reflect the interconnecting social and cultural worlds of children
  • recognise that a bicultural approach is necessary when assessing children’s learning within bicultural and bilingual programmes
  • acknowledge multiple cultural lenses on assessment and learning.

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological-contextual model is founded on the idea that all the social worlds of children and their families are intimately connected in a number of ways. Learning is enhanced when there are connections and relationships between early childhood settings away from home and other places and spaces in children’s lives."The developmental potential of a child rearing setting is increased as a function of the number of supportive links between that setting and other contexts involving the child or persons responsible for his or her care. Such interconnections may take the form of shared activities, two way communication, and information provided in each setting about the others."

page 847

Reminding us of cultural perspectives, Lisa Delpit (1995) warns:"We all interpret behaviours, information, and situations through our own cultural lenses; these lenses operate involuntarily, below the level of conscious awareness, making it seem that our own view is simply 'the way it is'”.

page 151

Lesieli I. Kupu MacIntyre (2001) highlights this point in a paper in which she offers a Pasifika perspective on assessment in early childhood education. She points out, for instance, that there is no one word in Tongan for the word “assessment”. Instead there are three words – “sivi”, “tesi”, and “fe‘auhi”. When translated into English, these words become “examination”, “test”, and “competition”.

Quality in Action: Te Mahi Whai Hua (page 57) points out that, for many Māori, the ways in which information is shared with whānau can be as important as the information itself.