Assessments

  As an educator a holistic approach for assessment is significant to providing the proper strategies for academic growth and development.  The holistic approach should be ongoing and continuous.  There are several factors which are affiliated with the holistic approach for a child.  The first important aspect is to gather information from a variety of perspectives in order to learn more information about the child.  This information could be gathered from an individual who is very familiar with the child such as a parent, previous teacher, older sibling, older family member, etc.   The perspective of an individual familiar with the child can give valuable information about the personality of the child and the child’s life outside of the classroom.  The second valuable aspect to a holistic approach is researching the child’s understanding of learning.  Learning occurs in life outside of the classroom.  As an educator it is also important to understand how a child learns in multiple settings.  For example, children with autism spectrum disorder are an extreme example of multiple intelligences (Berger, 2018).  It is significant to learn about each individual child and how they obtain knowledge.  There are some children, such as those with multiple intelligences, then it is restrictive and prejudicial to expect everyone to be the same (Berger, 2018).  Based on the valuable research conducted, an educator can provide strategies for effective ways to promote learning in the home as well as the school.  An educator can also create and implement assessments, based on the holistic approach of the individual learner, that will provide valuable information about the knowledge the learner has obtained after a lesson or unit. 

1.   In the people’s republic of China, educational assessment is driven by high stakes assessments and China is an examination driven society (OECD, 2011)

Chinese classroom practices focus on the following:

•  Rigorously controlled teaching demonstrations that are frequently evaluated by peers and administrators. (OECD, 2011)
• Maximizing student scores on all forms of evaluation (OECD, 2011)
• Removal of curriculum content not explicitly evaluation by the examination system (OECD, 2011)
• High student workloads to ensure mastery of examination material (OECD, 2011)
• Teacher-centric transmission of discipline specific and bookish knowledge (OECD, 2011)
• Mechanistic, rote learning, memory-driven, learning and pedagogical strategies (OECD, 2011) 

  It is important to remember that children develop a range of strategies as problem solvers and in doing this make hypotheses, try these out analyze what happens, identify patterns, generate rules, use analogy come to conclusions and move on (Smidt, 2006).  I believe it is extremely important to provide a student with the freedom to explore as well as discover the world and a holistic approach provides this type of opportunity for the children.

References:

Berger, K. S. (2018). The developing person through childhood. (8th edition). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.

OECD. (2011). Strong performers and successful reformers in education: Lessons from PISA for the United States. Paris: Author. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]

Smidt, S. (2006).  The developing child in the 21^st century.  A global perspective on child development.  New York, NY: Routledge.