Assesment practices for stimulating learning in kindergarten education

While there is a consensus on the importance of kindergarten education for later learning, scientific literature highlights a duality between a developmental perspective, essentially focused on the child and the overall development, and an academic perspective, more oriented towards mastering specific academic content and preparing for elementary school (Bernier et al., 2017; Dumais & Marinova, 2020). The academic perspective is justified by the desire to combat inequalities (Little & Cohen-Vögel, 2016), by ensuring that by the end of kindergarten education, all pupils have mastered the disciplinary prerequisites needed to tackle primary school. Advocates of the developmental perspective, however, seem to fear that setting precise standards will lead to a formal approach to teaching that is detrimental to children's development. While these two perspectives may seem antagonistic, DeLuca et al. (2020) believe that they can be combined in kindergarten classes: it's a question of striking the right balance between respect for the child's development and the desire to bring all pupils to master expectations in content areas. Do teachers clearly perceive this balance and, if so, how will they reconcile these two visions? This is the question addressed in this paper. Focusing on the assessment practices of teachers in the last year of kindergarten, it aims to explore their conceptions, as well as the problems posed by assessment in kindergarten. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 teachers. These were supplemented by photographs assessment tools and observation of assessment practice. These data were analysed through a qualitative approach. The results raised two major questions. The first concerns teachers' attitudes to the heterogeneity of students in the classroom: teachers were much more likely to talk about their attitude towards students in difficulty, compared with advanced students. Managing heterogeneity even means sometimes focusing exclusively on struggling students. Behind this desire to mobilize resources on the students who need them most, isn't there a risk of encouraging the stigmatization of difficulties that are only emerging or entirely transitory? Aren’t certain postures towards pupils in difficulty likely to lead to an impoverishment of the learning opportunities offered to these pupils? The second question arises from what some teachers have to say about the attitudes of certain children. Some seem to attribute these attitudes to characteristics internal to the child (for example, the fact of systematically choosing a play workshop, when offered the choice, is sometimes interpreted as a supposedly stable characteristic of the child's character, such as laziness). Such a error of judgement made, this could also amplify the problem by looking, through other observations, for clues that reinforce teacher’s feeling. More broadly speaking, given that the evaluation of developmental objectives is often based on free observations, we feel it is important to examine the issue of evaluative judgment in greater depth, to ensure that the findings can lead to actions to support students' progress in this domain.