Early Childhood Development: Assessing Cognitive and Social Abilities

This essay delves into the critical aspects of early childhood development, emphasizing the significance of cognitive and social skill assessment. The author, an aspiring early childhood educator, outlines the desired outcomes for children, including the development of attention, communication, problem-solving, and fine motor skills. The essay details the purpose of assessment in evaluating these skills, covering physical, cognitive, language, and social-emotional domains. It explores various assessment methods, such as observation, diagnostic assessments, and formative and summative evaluations, highlighting how data is used to focus on areas of development and inform parents. The author stresses the importance of parental involvement and effective instruction based on assessment results, ultimately promoting a holistic approach to early childhood development. The essay is supported by cited references, providing a comprehensive overview of the subject.

Running head: EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
Early childhood development
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
1) Early childhood development is crucial for the development of cognitive skills, emotional
abilities (Pellegrini & Galda, 2017). As an early childhood in structure, I want the children to
develop attention skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills, social skills, and fine
motor skills.
After leaving the classroom, I want the children to communicate properly, shows the curiosity to
the surroundings, able to solve the complex problem. Moreover, I want them to be creative and
imaginative, recognize numbers and particle things.
2) The purpose of the early childhood assessment is to evaluate the cognitive and social skills of
infants for monitoring their development. There is four domain of childhood development, which
includes physical development, cognitive developmental domain, and language development
domain (Navit et al., 2015). Motor skills should be assessed for understanding physical
development. Cognitive development can be assessed by remembering capacity, understanding,
and capability of the plan (Bennet et al., 2018). For language development, use of correct words,
grammatically correct languages. For understanding the social and emotional domain, the ability
of communication, the response to surrounds can be assessed (Navit et al., 2015).
3) The assessment can be done by observing each child in various situation, evaluating the
strength and weakness of the children. Diagnostic assessment can be done for understanding the
capabilities and skill set of the child (Roberts-Holmes, 2015). An upper limit can be set for every
child in order to evaluate the absence of normal skills. Formative assessment can be done for
understanding in-class activities. After observing the skills, summative assessment such as the
report card can be made incorporating the entire attribute that strengthen the children and the
entire attribute that hinders their development (Bennet et al., 2018).

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EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
4) The assessment measures how students are learning. Therefore, assessment data would be
used for focusing the area of development of children (Bennet et al., 2018). A session can be
arranged with parents where I would inform each parent about the strength and weakness of the
child. The assessment would help the parents to understand where their children lack which
hinders their cognitive and social development (Navit et al., 2015). The assessment would further
help in implementing effective instruction for the children and it would be helpful for parents to
focus on the weakness for better early childhood development (Bennet et al., 2018).

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EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
References :
Bennet, J. (2018). Pedagogy in early childhood services with special reference to Nordic
approaches. Psychological Science, 7(1).
Navit, S., Chadha, D., Khan, S. A., Singh, R. K., Johri, N., Navit, P., ... & Bahuguna, R. (2015).
The mystery of handprints: Assesment and correlation of dermatoglyphics with early
childhood caries a case-control study. Journal of clinical and diagnostic research:
JCDR, 9(10), ZC44.
Pellegrini, A., & Galda, L. (2017). The development of school-based literacy: A social ecological
perspective. Routledge.
Roberts-Holmes, G. (2015). The ‘datafication’of early years pedagogy:‘if the teaching is good,
the data should be good and if there’s bad teaching, there is bad data’. Journal of
education policy, 30(3), 302-315.