Monday, June 20, 2011

When I Think of Child Development . . .

“Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure.  Do not mistake a child for his symptom.” 
~Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Children want to love, beloved and learn.  They deserve the right to be in a non-judgmental  environment where everything a child does is an accomplishment and failure does not exist.  Judging a child negatively, could affect their resilience and damage their self esteem.  Children are naturally beautiful and innocent and we should not place the results of negative childhood development on that child.


THANK YOU!

To my colleagues: 
I want to thank my colleagues for their support, feedback, and sharing of their knowledge.  Without your support, I may not have made it this far.  We went from total strangers to an inseparable team that we are today.  I am certain that we will never forget the never-ending pressure of assignments and deadlines we faced together.  We encouraged one another, helped each other and tackled things together.  I wish you all much success and a promising future in the early childhood field.

To my teacher:
I would like to extend my most sincere thanks to my teacher Dr. Dispagna.  Thank you so much for your increasing guidance, encouragement, devotion and support you’ve shown these last eight weeks.

Valerie

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Testing for Intelligence?

On the subject of viewing children holistically, I believe that tests should cover much more than academic skills such as reading and mathematics.  Children have many learning styles and they should all be included in intelligence tests.  If a child learns through hands-on experiences and seeing, then expecting that child to listen to instructions without giving concrete hands-on relationships is not teaching to the whole child and test results will be inaccurate for these children.

Studies have shown that traditional “IQ” tests work well at predicting academic success but fall short of testing children’s “emotional intelligence.”  These predictions of success may not only be wrong, but they may create inaccurate expectations for children and their parents.  Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman offers a new concept not only for predicting school success, but future life success.  He suggests that a number of ingredients add up to good “emotional intelligence,” including self-control or impulse control, the ability to motivate one’s self, persistence, optimism, self-understanding, empathy, the art of listening to others.  He feels that children with superior cognitive skills do not always live up to their promise because they do not always possess solid emotional intelligence (Brodkin, A. M.  2010).

I looked at Switzerland, to see how children were assessed and found that special agencies in each of the Swiss Cantons were responsible for the investigatory procedures.  The special education needs are mostly identified by medical doctors and early intervention specialists including school psychologists, but the final decision is made by the school administrative board.  There is no standard instrument available at this time but orientation on ICF is under discussion.

I found my research on intelligence testing very informative.  My nephew has just been tested for the “gifted” program.  Before this assignment, I had very little knowledge on the way he was tested, as to whether or not he was tested with the whole child in mind.  I will be a more active participant in his education plan because of this new knowledge I have acquired.

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