Abstract:

Education considers each child unique, and its uniqueness is that starting point in all decisions made by the adult with the primary purpose of helping him to develop fully. The early education of the child lays the foundations for his further development, childhood being the age of fundamental acquisitions, the period in which the child gains autonomy in knowledge, he discovers his own abilities and limits and outlines the first elements of self-awareness. For a harmonious development, from an early age we can teach children about the value that each of them has, and we can achieve this in kindergarten through appropriate steps, through their active participation in the process of knowledge and self-knowledge.

Through this study we aim to analyze the perspective of teachers for preschool education on self-assessment methods used in kindergarten. Self-assessment is the key element in formative assessment, is the process during which children reflect on the quality of their work, become responsible for their own learning, increase their self-esteem and become much more positive. Preschoolers must learn to self-assess, and this presupposes the fulfillment of preconditions: to know very well the objectives that the teacher pursues through the act of teaching and that they will have to achieve through the act of learning. This only becomes possible if, in addition to the objectives, the teacher for pre-school education clearly communicates to the children the evaluation and grading criteria.

To collect the data, we applied an online questionnaire to 245 teachers for preschool education, both in urban and rural areas. One of the questions was the choice of self-assessment methods they use in the classroom. The study shows that in state-funded kindergartens using mostly the simplest methods of self-assessment, such as self-scoring your own work (using „smiley faces” or „stars”) (87.3%) and self-correction (according to certain criteria) (76.7%), and less complex ones like the „traffic light” (20%), „reflective diary” (15%), „structured rubrics” (7.3%) or „checklist” (6.5%).

From the answers of the teachers participating in the research, It turns out that 86% of them want to participate in training courses on self-assessment in preschoolers. In this article we will describe and exemplify methods and techniques of self-assessment specific to preschool age, successfully applied in our kindergartens.

Keywords:

Early education, self-assessment, self-assessment methods, preschoolers, kindergarten.