Though it is important to focus on how much a child can read and write, there are other important areas that educators need to focus on in order to come up with the right development evaluation and test of intelligence on the child. These area are:
- Communication and Language: This includes the child's ability to listen and pay attention for a reasonable period of time, understand and speak and communicate confidently.
- Physical development: In this area, the child's ability to move and handle objects is observes especially during indoor and outdoor play. Also, the educator also finds out how much the child under her care can take care of him or herself. For example, Can the child tie his or her shoe lace? etc.
- Personal, Social and emotional development: It is also important for educators to access children's confidence, self awareness, ability to manage feelings and behavior and how much they can make relationships with others.
- Expressive arts and design: Is the child imaginative while exploring and using media and other materials?
The reason behind the above mentioned areas of assessment is to ascertain their biosocial, cognitive and phycosocial development respectively.
In Nigeria, school age children are accessed through formal testing. There is more concentration on testing children's ability of reading and writing. Most times, teachers do no carry out personal observation which is a kind of informal test on the children, especially in the public schools. Because of this, some children's level of creativity cannot be ascertained as they are not exposed to hands on activities.
It is very necessary that educators should focus on informal personal observation for children. While doing so, proper documentations should be made after every observation session in order to keep record of the speed and level of development of the child. This will also enable the educator and the school administration to know when to advocate for intervention where there is a case of abnormality.
