Quote about Children

"Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven."
Henry Ward Beecher

I love this quote, it reminds me of my children when they were small and always staring up and smiling. My mother and grandmother would say the angels are playing with them! I believed that they were so close to heaven at that age, that this statement was true.

Testing

When you speak of assessing a child holistically I often think of the many ways that we assess children in our center. There are many standardized test that our children go through yet we also assess our children physically. We have a dental chair that comes every year to exam our children's teeth, we have organizations that do hearing and vision screenings. We also take a look into the personal lives of our children. We do a survey in the beginning that ask important questions about the needs of the family. We have the ability if needed to assess our children mentally through collaboration with our mental health physicians. Reaching a child holistically is extremely important when you take care of more then just the child's academic needs you increase the child's ability to do more in the classroom. For example when I am not in pain from a swollen gum line during class, I can concentrate on the questions your asking me, and answer them to the best of my ability.

During my research of assessments in other countries i found that student assessments do not match in any two countries.In England, Silvermail (1996) found that schools provide multiple measures of performance that

serve multiple purposes. Schools assess student progress through both a national examination

and teacher-made tests when students reach the ages of seven, eleven, fourteen, and sixteen.

These exams are primarily used to measure the effectiveness of the schools in delivering the

national curriculum. All schools must follow nationally prescribed content and pedagogic

methods and set targets for individual pupil learning (Whetton, Twist, and Sainsbury, 2000).

Gipps, Clarke, and McCallum (1998) assert that this system places too little emphasis on

assessment of learning and too much on assessment for learning.

The French educational system employs three sets of national assessments of student

progress. At the beginning of grades three, six, and nine, students are tested for diagnostic and

planning purposes. By the end of grade nine, students are tested to measure attainment. At the

end of high school, tests determine students’ professional and educational futures. Researchers

point out that although French educators complain about the complexity of the high-stakes, end of-

high-school exam, the public and the media support it (Fowler, 2001).