Video transcript
Susan Irvine
Professor of Early Childhood, Queensland University of Technology
In assessment, it can be difficult to know where to focus our attention. The Queensland Kindergarten Learning guideline and the continua provide a really important reference point for that. We can't capture everything, and we don't need to.
Building familiarity with the guideline and the continua helps us to be intentional, and it helps us to think about how we can embed assessment in a meaningful and manageable way in our daily work with children and families.
To ensure that assessment is valid, reliable and fair, we need to be thinking about what learning we're assessing and what's going to constitute evidence. We need to think about how we're going to assess: observations, conversations, artifacts.
We need to think about where and when in the kindergarten program we're going to assess — thinking about giving children the best opportunity to show what they know and can do. And arguably most importantly, we need to think about why this information is significant, and why it needs to be documented
We're interested in individual children's learning, development and well-being and the continua supports us to think about that — to observe and to assess children's learning, and then to think about where they are in their learning, and what might come next in terms of that. One of the characteristics of effective assessment is that we can think about and describe children's learning on a continuum, and that's what the continua does. It helps us to think about where children are and where they're heading, and building familiarity with that will help us to plan.
I think it's really important for us to stop and reflect on whether an assessment approach is fit for purpose — really thinking about what we're trying to gather evidence of, and how we're giving children (and diverse learners) the very best opportunity to show what they can do and know.
- Last updated:
- 22 September 2025
