Have you ever tried to make a cup of hot chocolate but when you went to the cupboard you did not have cocoa mix? Well it happened to me. I recently wanted to drink a yummy cup of hot chocolate only to find that there was none in my house.
What’s a person to do?! Well I had some baking cocoa. I thought why not try baking cocoa and see if I could make hot chocolate with baking cocoa.
Hmmmmmmmm????
What a disaster! Do not try this unless you want to have caked on bitter cocoa stuck to your teeth! It tasted horrible.
I was trying to use an ingredient for something other than its intended purpose.
Baking cocoa is meant to go into recipes like cookies, NOT make a delicious cup of hot chocolate.
I learned something important that day and that is to use ingredients and materials for their intended purpose. When I substituted baking cocoa for hot chocolate mix it did not work. Major FAIL!
Similarly, when we assess children we want to use assessment tools for their intended purpose. For example, using a diagnostic assessment would not work well if we wanted to do ongoing assessment of individual children over time to see how well they are learning/developing and responding to their early childhood curriculum and instruction. The best tool for that purpose would be a curriculum-based assessment (CBA). My colleagues and I are publishing a new edition of a widely used CBA called the AEPS3® (Bricker, Dionne, Grisham, Johnson, Macy, Slentz, & Waddell, 2022) for infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarteners. It would be a useful tool if the intention is gather information about children’s development and learning, as well as have a curriculum to use with instruction.
When assessment is used for the intended purpose, results can be meaningful for children.
Source:
Bricker, D., Dionne, C., Grisham, J., Johnson, J.J., Macy, M., Slentz, K., & Waddell, M. (2022). Assessment, Evaluation, and Programming System for Infants and Children, Third Edition (AEPS®-3). Baltimore: Brookes Publishing Co.