Weaknesses and strenghts in assessing early childhood programmes: an assessment of an early childhood spanish trilingual priogramme in two- to three- year- old children

Abstract

This article gives an account of the results from an assessment of an early childhood education programme, conducted over the course of two academic years (1999–2000 and 2000–2001), in a centre in northeastern Spain. The purpose of the assessment was to discover how a particular educational programme contributed to the short‐term competency levels of children aged from two to three years old. The programme’s curriculum encompassed different areas of development, including physical exercise and motor movement and social and linguistic development, using a unique teaching methodology that exposes the children to three different languages at the same time. The article includes a discussion of the weaknesses and strengths in implementing evaluation in early childhood education programmes, and concludes with some guiding principles that may prove useful in the evaluation of the appropriateness of any given assessment method used within an early childhood educational programme.