Development and Assessment of Young Children

Developmental assessment of Young children 4 (1+3)

Lesson 4:Environmental Assessment

Guidelines for Assessing Environments

Assessing environments is in many ways a very different process from assessing children. Certain guidelines to be followed for effective environmental assessment include
The assessor should be aware of published guide lines for environmental provisions.

1. The published criteria for high quality early childhood programme cover the following 10 areas
• Interactions among staff and children
• Curriculum
• Staff/parent interactions
• Staff qualifications and development
• Administration
• Staffing
• Physical environment
• Health and safety
• Nutrition and food service
• Evaluation
2. Recognizing the complexity of environmental assessment: Environmental assessments must be conducted with the realization that it is always an interactive context and cannot be done in the absence of children. Walking into a room and examining the materials, equipment and arrangements is an important first step.
   However until the examiner had an opportunity to see how the environment is used and how adults and children in the environment behave, the overall picture will be incomplete.
3. Focusing on functions and not on form: The environment in child care should fulfill certain basic functions or needs. (Safe, warm, developmentally facilitative, independent promoting, enjoyable, normalized.). Environmental assessments should focus on whether these functions are achieved.
4. Having familiarity with and use of variety of assessment strategies: Number of strategies may be used to assess environments which include interviewing adults and direct observational assessments. Methods like schematic diagram, checklists and rating scales can be used to collect data on environment
• Schematic diagram: To analyze the environment in terms of spatial arrangement and priority, activity patterns of children.
• Checklists: List of environmental provisions that can be checked by asking adults, observing interactional patterns.
• Rating scales: It consists of a number of items organized into several dimensions of environmental provisions. The items may be scored in a binary fashion. (Yes/No) with several values good, average, poor, adequate, inadequate, not at all adequate.