Research On Child Development Assessment Of Children Aged 0-5 In The UK

High-quality preschool education must not only follow the general rules of child development,but also meet the individual developmental needs of each child..In order to create such an education,preschool educators need to fully understand each child and use their expertise to accurately assess children’s developmental levels in various areas so as to build appropriate scaffolds for children’s learning and development.Due to the political vision of building a high-quality preschool education system,the practical need to provide developmentally appropriate education for children,and the lack of policies to assess preschool children,the UK has decided to promote the high-quality development of preschool education through child development assessment.Since 1997,when child development assessment was first put on the agenda,the UK government has been committed to developing and optimizing policies to guide the implementation and reform of child development assessment across the country.The evolution of the policies can be divided into four stages: the initial development stage(1997-2002),the legalization stage(2003-2011),the vertical extension stage(2012-2016),and the reform deepening stage(2017-present).Now,the UK has established a systematic child development assessment procedure,with Progress Check at Age 2,Reception Baseline Assessment,and Early Years Foundation Stage Profile at the core.In order to support teachers in carrying out assessment with high quality and efficiency,the UK government has set out in its policy the basic procedures for assessing the development of preschool children,including defining the objectives and targets of the evaluation,clarifying the main content of the assessment,planning the implementation of the assessment and properly handling the results of the assessment.In the meantime,the government has established expected levels that children of different ages should achieve in seven major areas of learning and development,providing clear and specific indicators for teachers to assessment children’s development levels.The UK’s child development assessment process is characterized by flexible and diverse assessment methods,diverse participation of assessment subjects,inclusive assessment objects,alongside reasonable and appropriate moderation of results.After more than 20 years of reform and development,the UK has successfully improved the standardization and validity of child development assessment,and has achieved remarkable results in reducing teachers’ assessment workload,promoting the professionalization of teachers’ assessment,and enhancing high-quality teacher-child interaction.However,in practice,practitioners have found that they had encountered some challenges,for example,the revision of the assessment indicators are not quite unreasonable,the increasing focus of the assessment on certain development areas might limit the breadth of early education curriculum,and the assessment results could solidify teachers’ perception of the child.Based on the analysis of UK’s practice,China can pay more attention to the following six points when formulating the development assessment strategy for preschool children: improving the development assessment policy as a guide to strengthen the guidance of child development assessment;promoting children’s overall development as the goal to meet children’s individualized educational needs;taking the "observation-assessment-planning" cycle as the path to build the framework for implementing formative assessment;using the results of summative assessment as the basis to monitor the development of preschool children nationwide;using the perspective of multiple subjects as the source to build a complete picture of children’s development;and strengthening teachers’ professional development to enhance the credibility of their judgment.