Development and Assessment of Young Children

Developmental assessment of Young children 4 (1+3)

Lesson 4:Environmental Assessment

Assessment of effects of environments

As environments are interactive in nature the aim of environmental assessment is to know how it influences the behavior of children and adults. For example environment with inadequate space and insufficient or inappropriate toys and materials is likely to result in higher levels of aggressive behavior.
The two measures used to assess the environmental effectiveness include

• Engagement
• Eco behavioural assessment

Engagement: It refers to the extent to which children are actively and appropriately involved with materials, people or activities in the environment.
Non engagement: It includes self stimulatory behavior, non attending, aggressive behavior, aimless wandering or inappropriate behavior.
Ecobehavioural Assessment: It is a means of assessing programme variables through systematic observation and measuring the moment to moment effects of an array of variables upon student behavior. There are three levels of analysis which include Molar descriptions Molecular descriptions and Process product analysis.

Molar descriptions	Molecular descriptions	Process product analysis
Show how adults and children spend their time during the day. In general terms engaged Vs non engaged More specific terms Ex: direct instruction Location of play Peer interaction	Programmes are determined by computing conditional probabilities Ex: when a teacher is reading the story what a child or children are doing? Listening or participating.	It looks at the relationship between molecular relationships and molar descriptions and children’s subsequent outcomes such as enhanced developmental progress.