Eğitim Kuram ve Uygulama Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

Early childhood covers the ages between 0 and 8
of human life, and children cover half of the distance they will make in many
developmental areas during their lifetime. The development of children should
be supported in the correct and appropriate ways during early childhood, which
is emphasized by the studies conducted for the human life. Within the scope of
this support, it is necessary to collect regular and continuous data on
children's learning and development; and to organize and interpret - in other words
evaluate the data obtained in order to make the right decisions about teaching.
During the evaluation of children, along with the progress of children's
development, it should be aimed to evaluate the partaker elements involved in
the children's education process and to make necessary arrangements and
interventions as a result of the evaluations. State institutions, private
institutions, and non-governmental organizations engaged in the subject conduct
multi-faceted studies on the evaluation of early childhood. The primary
objective of these studies is to ensure that disadvantaged children have equal
opportunities with their peers by overcoming their shortcomings. Individual
differences among children, characteristics of their families, cultural and experiential
backgrounds will not be enough to try to determine needs through uniform
assessments.  In order to be able to make
effective evaluations in early childhood, it is important to remember that
children learn through practices, interactions, and experiences, rather than by
using paper or pencil, or by abstract thinking, and therefore while evaluating
them, the methods used should be different from those used in evaluating older
children. Disadvantages arise in terms of time since the methods to be used in
the evaluation of children in this period are different, the attention period
of the child is too short and evaluations should be carried out by individual
studies with the children. Each of the evaluation types of children influences
how and when the evaluation is carried out in different ways. There are many
measurement tools in the world and in our country to evaluate and screen the
general development of children. The application and scoring processes and
scopes of these measurement tools differ from each other. As a result, it is
difficult to determine the most appropriate evaluation method and tool for
children in this period.