When I Think of Child Development.....

Quotes about childhood development that captures the essence of how I think about child development:

All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.        
     Albert Einstein


Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.
     Johana Wolfgang von Goethe


All growth depends upon activity.  There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.
     Calvin Coolidge

Testing for Intelligence?

I believe that social skills/communicating with others and emotions should be measured.  My reason for stating that is that I believe it is important for children to be able to relate with others in life.  People that lack social skills or that prefer being alone all the time; more often appears to have some type of psychological problem.  They are withdrawn from society.  I think we need to know that children are able to relate to themselves as well as others.  We should also assess their emotional intelligence to see if they are care about people or if they have a destructive mindset (harmful to themselves and others).

I chose to look at the school-age children in Kenya on the ways they are assessed.  The children of Kenya were assessed more so on practical intelligence for adaptation to the environment than for intelligence.  The reason for this is because most of the children will drop out of school, and most will spend their lives farming or engaged in other occupations.  “The Kenya study suggests that the identification of a general factor of human intelligence may tell us more about how abilities interact with patterns of schooling and especially Western patterns of schooling than it does about the structure of human abilities.”  However, today in the year 2011, Uwezo Kenya is an organization that was established in 2009 and it is housed by Women Educational Researchers of Kenya (WERK) in Nairobi.  “It conducts national household based assessments to establish the competencies of children between the age of 6-16 in literacy and numeracy.”  Through their assessments they are helping to improve and inform the quality of Education.  They work with partner organizations ranging from youth groups, Community Based, Faith Based, and Non Governmental Organizations.  Tests that they administer to the children between the ages of 6-16 are the Kiswahili, English, and Math.  “The tests are derived from class two level work.  This level is selected because it is internationally agreed that after completing two years of schooling, a pupil is expected to have acquired basic competencies in literacy and numeracy, which are foundational for learning in all the other subjects.”  As of March 20, 2011 124 districts had been assessed by Uwezo Kenya.  “A total of 72106 households were surveyed, 3574 schools visited and 124,243 children between the age of 6-16 assessed.”

Reference

http://orpc.iaccp.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=74%3Arobert-j-sternberg&catid=23%3Achapter&Itemid=15, retrieved June 11, 2011

http://uwezo.net/index.php?c=62, retrieved June 11, 2011