Testing for Intelligence?

     Assessments are an important aspect when working with children. Building on our observational, developmental and curriculum knowledge, we are able to make summative and formative assessments of children’s growth, development, knowledge, skills and interests. These assessments help us to communicate this information to families as well as other professionals. Assessment skills help us to create effective curriculum for both groups and individual children but also to assess our early learning environments. Assessments are intended to identify, document, support and promote children’s learning and development (ELECT, 2007). My role with assessments has never been targeted in the area of IQ testing; rather I use assessments as a tool to gather information regarding children’s skills, interests, development and how they learn. Gardner’s theory has been instrumental with the education of children, as it shows teachers that children can demonstrate knowledge in their own ways (Berger, 2012). With the tools that we use for assessments, it will give us information on how children learn. Gardner’s theory shows us that we should present concepts to the children in more than one way as each child will have his or her own preferred way of learning.

     The information from continuous assessments about individual children helps to plan curriculum and tailor interactions that responds to their strengths and needs. This information ensures that the program meets its goals for children's learning, developmental progress and can inform what improvements are needed to improve the program. Assessments also help to identify children who may be experiencing developmental difficulties and may need additional developmental assessment and specific interventions (ELECT, 2007).

Assessments on Children in Africa

We know that all children will develop and grow meeting the different skills and milestones at certain stages of development. With this, we also know that children will develop and meet these skills and milestones at their own pace and time.

It is important to recognize that developmental milestones can be different depending on the cultural background of a child. In an article, “Refining the Milestones: Assessing Child Development in Africa” it explains that some items in Western tests are not culturally appropriate for rural African populations and therefore cannot assess if children from those communities are developing normally (Trust, 2010). For example, activities such as preparing breakfast cereal, using a knife and fork, pedaling a tricycle and playing board games would be uncommon for children in rural Africa. A pink doll used in a ‘feeding the doll’ test can be terrifying to many children who may have never seen anything like it before. And some of the questions feature pictures – problematic when many children have never seen a book or a pictorial representation of an object before, let alone some of the more foreign objects (Trust, 2010).

Now, researchers from the College of Medicine in Blantyre, Malawi, and colleagues have designed a more culturally relevant developmental assessment tool to be used with children in rural Africa. Unfortunately, even with the tool, there are obstacles to improving child development in low-and middle-income countries. Many are limited in the resources they have available for screening children and for helping those whose development is delayed or disrupted.

According to the article, it states that tools such as MDAT will probably be used for research studies rather than for routine developmental assessments. However, it is an important development- the study illustrates an effective method for creating and validating a new, culturally relevant, assessment tool, and may aid the development of similar tools for other cultures.

     References

Berger, K.S. (2012). The developing person through childhood (6th edition). New York, NY: 

           Worth Publishers

Early Learning for Every Child Today, 2007.  Retrieved from

http://www.cfcollaborative.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ELECT.pdf

Website:

Refining the Milestones: Assessing Child Development in Africa

http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2010/08/11/refining-the-milestones-assessing-child-development-in-africa/

Hunger

Whenever I hear the word stressors, I would like to believe that only adults are impacted by the different stressors that inhibit our lives. Children should be free to be children…they should be nurtured, loved, fed and not have to take on the worries of the world. How luxurious that would be, however, we are not so fortunate, as children are just as impacted by the stressors that come in and out of their lives.

One stressor that has touched someone close to me is hunger. Hunger was a stressor that played a significant role throughout my husband’s early childhood. His parents moved to Canada from Germany when he was just a baby and they did not speak English. His parents struggled financially and there were many countless days where he went hungry. He remembers not being able to focus in school as all he could hear was his tummy rumbling. At that time there were no “breakfast clubs” as this was seen as an issue for developing countries, not in our community. His preoccupation with his talking tummy labeled him as a child who couldn’t pay attention and couldn’t focus. The teachers never identified the true reason for his lack of concentration.  His experience as a hungry child has impacted him now as a father of two children. He goes above and beyond to make sure that all of their wants and needs are met.  This experience also gave him the internal motivation to continue with his education and obtain a good job, so he wouldn’t have to experience a rumbling tummy ever again! I never question our grocery bills as his relationship with food and the lack of is something that I could never relate to.

We tend to think of hunger as something typically associated with underdeveloped countries, but in fact hunger is a stressor in our own communities.  Poverty is a main contributor to hunger (World Hunger Education.) Without the financial means to fulfill all expenses needed to live, may leave at times empty plates on the table.  I have worked in many programs where the majority of the clientele were low income families.  We made sure that we provided healthy and nutritious meals rich with protein, fruit and vegetables as we knew that might be the only meals they would consume for the day. We even sent home left over food at the end of the day to families who were open to take it. In our communities we have the food bank, breakfast clubs, and other organizations to aid families who are dealing with hunger, but what about the developing countries? How do they deal with hunger? 

An estimated 146 million children in developing countries are underweight - the result of acute or chronic hunger (Source: The State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 2009).

Africa

"More than 30 million children and adults across the swath of Africa face a devastating hunger crisis." Hunger in countries such as Africa due to poverty, poor rainfall, crop failures and skyrocketing food prices make it challenging for families to provide nutritious food for their children. Everyday children go without eating the right nutritious foods puts them behind in their growth and development. This hunger due to lack of food causes death, illness as their immune systems are down which make them vulnerable to diseases like diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia (Save the Children Federation, Inc.). We think that poverty causes hunger, but in turn hunger causes poverty as poor health, low energy levels, and hunger can lead to greater poverty as it increases the inability for people to work and learn.

Hunger around the world either in developing or developed countries will persist to be a stressor that we will maintain to battle as a universal issue unless we can put an end to hunger. Whether we are directly or indirectly impacted by it, we can choose to make a difference whether big measures or small!