Children’s Self-Evaluation In Independent Play Of Kindergarten-A Study From The Perspective Of Children

In February 2022,the Guidelines for Assessing the Quality of Kindergarten Care and Education issued by the Ministry of Education clearly put forward the principle of "child-centred" assessment,suggesting that scientific assessment should be adhered to,self-assessment should be strengthened,and the tendency to "emphasise other’s assessment over self-assessment" should be reversed.At the same time,the new trend in the concept of ECD assessment also emphasizes the subjectivity of children’s assessment and sees them as active contributors to their own learning and development.In contrast,the reality of educational assessment is that children’s self-assessment is not valued and does not allow them to exercise their subjectivity.Independent play,on the other hand,offers greater scope for self-evaluation activities because of its flexibility and freedom.Therefore,it is valuable and feasible to use independent play as a window to explore the real state of self-evaluation development of older children.In order to understand the self-evaluation of older children in independent play,this study selected 40 older children from a public kindergarten in Jiangxi Province as the subjects of the study,using observation,material stimulation and physical collection methods to collect data.After coding and analysing the data,and combining the theories of self-evaluation,the study investigated the self-evaluation of the older children in independent play and came up with the following findings:Firstly,in independent play,children’s self-evaluation was mainly conducted through two approaches: external reference and self-examination.The forms of self-evaluation differed between the two approaches.The older children’s self-evaluation in independent play is distinctive in its comprehensiveness,contextuality,randomness and vividness.Secondly,the process of children’s self-evaluation in independent play can be divided into three stages: forming self-evaluation criteria,obtaining evaluation feedback,and conducting evaluation reflection and judgement.The analysis also revealed that children’s self-evaluation process is cyclical in nature,and that children continue to develop a comprehensive and objective understanding of themselves through the cyclical self-evaluation process.Finally,this study found that self-evaluation by young children can facilitate their own learning and development.On the one hand,self-evaluation gives children a sense of self-worth and enables them to become self-love,self-esteem and self-confident people.On the other hand,self-evaluation enables children to reflect on themselves,identify and solve problems,draw lessons,propose new goals and improvement plans,and achieve personal growth.Combined with the above findings,this study suggests changing the concept of evaluation,respecting the subject position of children’s evaluation and believing in children’s self-evaluation ability;returning to natural evaluation and providing conditions to support children’s self-evaluation;as well as appropriate intervention by teachers to establish the correct concept of evaluation and promote the continuous development of children’s self-evaluation ability in older classes.