Pedagogical documentation

I was reading this sentence and felt if this situation happened to me, I would be so proud of myself challenging the accepted assessment! As Alcock (2000) stated, “Pedagogical documentation may also be used to challenge accepted assessment practices such as the obsessive and sometimes exclusive reliance on individually written observations of individual children” (p. 3).

Although almost everyone knows about the child individualism, and believe in uniqueness, we still are forced to do the assessment and evaluate each child’s capability to pass the test. In the first week of this module, we had articles about the reliability, validity, and ... of the test. As Rock and Stenner (2005) explained, “A useful test must be reliable, which means that it will produce essentially the same results on different occasions. Reliability can be measured in three ways: retesting, equivalent form, and internal consistency” (p. 17). I still am confused to accept the reason that we need to assess and evaluate children to receive the rate of the school in the area.

We have observed children do great job in the class and have appropriate developmental skills, but have difficulty do the same in specific situations. We all can see the benefit of have both observation and evaluation in the settings. Alcock (2000) emphasized, “At a micro level (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) many centres in this country do use some forms of pedagogical documentation for the ongoing formative assessment of children's learning and evaluation of their programs. Written child observations are probably the most prevalent form of documentation” (p.8).