Resources
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Authentic Assessment for Early Intervention
Physical therapist Megan Klish Fibbe describes and illustrates how authentic assessment practices enhance her early intervention work with children and their families, including the use of observation, conversations with families, and video. Click here to view the video. -
Functional Assessment
For additional information on functional assessment in early intervention please refer to the interactive module Initial and Ongoing Functional Assessment. Click here to view the module. -
Authentic Assessment for Early Education
Authentic assessment involves the teacher as an observer and a researcher – working from a background of solid education and specialized training, collecting data over time, selecting and organizing evidence (the portfolio), preparing a hypothesis that can be tested (the curriculum), sharing conclusions with parents and others to refine what will work best in guiding a child to develop to his or her potential, and developing lesson plans that will help students individually progress toward meeting learning expectations. Click here to view a publication. Click here to view the training materials.
Authentic and Functional
Authentic assessment is assessment of the child’s skills in the real life contexts of family, culture and community rather than discrete isolated tasks irrelevant to daily life.
Authentic assessment supports a strengths-based approach to planning for the child, as it is the context for identifying what a child can do in the context of naturally occurring activities and routines. Observing and getting to know children in the context of their typical daily routines and activities enables practitioners to see the mastery of many skills that are not necessarily seen in a testing situation. Additionally, having conversations with families provides insight into how a family functions and can support their child’s development; helping families to understand the importance of typical family routines as the context for their child’s learning.
Functional assessment helps the team develop a picture of the child’s skills and behaviors in his or her own everyday activities and routines. It also provides information about the child’s functioning related to the three global early childhood outcomes. Additionally, this type of assessment helps the team identify methods and strategies likely to promote the child’s learning and development so the team can identify functional and meaningful IFSP outcomes or IEP goals which support the child’s functioning in the three early childhood outcome areas. The team can then identify effective methods and strategies to meet these outcomes and goals.
Components of functional assessment:
- What are the child’s and family’s everyday routines and activities?
- How is the child participating in these activities?
- How does the child’s participation compare to that expected for a child of his or her age?
Functional assessment practices include gathering information from families, observing the child, and/or using criterion referenced tools. Functional assessment occurs:
- In all settings where a child spends time (e.g., child care, home, at a relative’s house)
- During activities which the family has identified as priorities or areas of concern
- Across the different activity settings in which skills and abilities being assessed typically occur
Eliciting functional information from families involves:
- More than asking questions, or going over questionnaires and developmental profiles
- Listening to the family’s story
- Hearing about the child’s engagement, independence, and social relationships with various day-to-day routines and activities
- Asking parents to show or describe
- Observing how the parent engages the child
- Setting up play scenarios
Authentic and functional assessment is guided by the sequences and timetables in typical development. This provides an essential framework for interpreting the behaviors and skills exhibited by infants, toddlers, and preschoolers during evaluation/assessment procedures.
