Portfolio assessment: self-evaluation for children with learning disabilities

Abstract

Children’s achievement and performance through marks or grades are often considered as a tool to determine a child’s ability. What goes beyond the marks and grades were often ignored. Are marks and grades not affected by social-emotional factors? Through field experiences and search in literature, the author has come to believe that the fundamentals of learning in young children stem from strong social-emotional domain. The relationships between cognitive and social-emotional-behavioural development are closely related and cannot be ignored. It is believed that the relationship appear to be even more significant in the population of children who have Learning Disabilities (LD) inherent or otherwise. Children with LD have been predisposed to the many learning problems in schools in their early years. Feeling like failures, these children may even face constant negatively labelling in schools by adults and peers; they have greater need to develop strong social-emotional-behavioural domains than other children. It is worthwhile to spend some efforts to have a closer look at the issues involving social-emotional and behavioural development. The author hoped to device an alternative approach by using portfolio to assessing young children with social-emotional-behavioural problems through which mediation or enhancement of social-emotional and behavioural domains of children can be used by teachers, parents and caregivers.