Writing Effective Preschool Assessment Reports: A Quick Guide
One of the most complex tasks for an educator can be to prepare progress reports. They need to record and highlight several observations in respect of the skills the students are learning. It could be challenging to create assessments for preschool kids as they have just started to learn and develop those skills. At a preschool, it becomes difficult to keep a track of every student’s unique skill as they develop those habits with the help of their educator and several different teaching methods.
Challenges to Creating an Effective Pre K Assessment Report
A progress report helps educators and parents understand the student’s academic and social development. It also assists them in clarifying their future goals and creating a learning and development path. Generally, progress reports can be made in two ways:
The Checklist Format
All the important work, skills, and lessons a child has received get formatted in this report. Later, their curriculum is prepared to keep specific areas in mind for child assessment and evaluation. These evaluation keys are different, but the aspect is presented, practiced, and implemented later. A checklist report focuses on the key or grade irrespective of the child’s personal qualities and personal development. These recorded sheets play an important role for every Montessori teacher as it helps them observe and take ahead each child’s progress.
The Narrative Progress Report
This report is one of the most difficult for the teachers to create, but the parents highly benefit from this format. This report is highly explanatory as it is made in such an extensive way that the parents can understand exactly what their child is learning. A narrative progress report helps the parents understand that each child is different and unique. This report gives precise detail and description for the ones whose development cannot be explained or assisted by using the checklist method.
There are a few basic challenges an educator may face to create a report, for example, understanding that every child has unique qualities, and these qualities have to come upfront on the progress report.
Educator’s language plays a key role while creating this particular type of assessment for preschool kids. Usually, in a Montessori school, an educator cannot give feedback in a very direct language, their tone and the route of conversation should be more humble, polite, and non-offensive. For instance, rather than stating “Martha runs too fast in the class and needs to walk slow” in the report, you can say “Martha is advised to make use of walking feet”. Adapting the required language can be the most difficult part of writing a progress report. But, fret not, Illumine’s preschool assessment app is designed to help you overcome challenges like these.
7 Key Ways To Create An Effective Preschool Progress Report
Keep It Easy to Understand
While writing a report, you must make every sentence quite understandable and write in simple English. It is also recommended to avoid using any technical jargon. Use two connected ideas for every given sentence to help the parents understand how their child is growing and progressing.
For instance: “While we are practicing problem-solving situations, Esther needs to understand the mathematical idea and explain it to us first instead of directly giving out the answer.”
Avoid Keeping Loopholes and Stick to the Point
While writing a report, there are many pointers where the educator may directly jump off unknowingly by providing unnecessary information. This practice will only confuse parents. Instead of this, you can adopt the approach where you inform parents only about the matters which are related to the child.
For instance: Instead of writing “During our inquiry sessions, Jake happily participates and narrates several different ideas in the class discussion in front of all the students.” You can write “Jake actively participates in the class discussion and shares his ideas with other classmates with all energy.”
Enlighten the Parents About Their Child’s Achievements
Nothing can be more exciting and joyful for parents but to know about the skills their child has excelled in. Their performance, level of achievements, and improvement areas have to be decoded clearly in the report.
For instance: Instead of writing “Donald has started to develop an efficient mental and written strategy by using the right digital technologies for multiplication and division where there is no remainder” You can write “Donald perfectly knows how to make use of his knowledge of multiplication facts to understand the various range of problems, now he is concentrating on problems with bigger numbers.”
Explain the Children’s Ongoing Performance
When parents read their child’s report, they would like to know about all the things their child learned and how good they are performing.
For instance: Rather than writing “Anna has done the given writing task” you can write, “Anna has managed to complete the given writing goal by creating an informative text without the use of a scaffold. She is now proceeding towards punctuating her writing correctly”.
Impart your Expertise With Your Comments
When you write the reports, it is important to give your commentary, feedback, and understanding about the child and their achievements and samples to support the statement.
Your comments will provide action points to the parents for their children. They will be able to understand what the child has achieved and where they need to work for the child’s development.
Let the Student Play an Important Role in Your Report
When you write a student’s progress report, it is imperative to involve the student as much as possible. Try to understand their understanding and learning goals. Although they are preschoolers with developing minds, try and talk to them, they might have some interesting ideas that might inspire your assessment, get to know their strong areas, and what requires some improvement.
This will help you authenticate your understanding and comments for the student by giving them the authority to judge their progress independently.
Don’t be Demoralising and Be Positive
You will be providing feedback about the student in the assessment report and will also be stating the student’s weak areas to be improved. But ensure that you start and end the conversation with the parents as well as the assessment report in a positive manner. State the facts but don’t express it in a way that the parents or the student lose confidence and find it demoralising. Be careful in expressing your thoughts as it might directly impact the child’s mental health and development.
How Illumine Can Help With Its Preschool Assessment Tools
At Illumine, we provide pre-school assessment tools to help teachers and educators prepare and disseminate progress reports easily through the preschool assessment app.
Creating assessments for preschool kids is not an easy task, it takes a lot of time and effort in analyzing, documenting, and generating the reports. Our assessment tools can become a part of your educational ecosystem that will support the teaching and learning process by providing valuable and effective insights about every child by planning weekly lessons, assessing the child’s development progress, and even managing the curriculum. You can try a free demo of our software, contact us now!
