BETWEEN OBSERVATION AND DOCUMENTATION: ASSESSMENT AS A PROCESS FOR MONITORING LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

Abstract

This article discusses assessment in Early Childhood Education through the relationship between observation, documentation, pedagogical monitoring and inclusion. Assessment is understood not as measurement or early classification, but as interpretation of children’s lived processes and use of records to improve planning. The discussion addresses mediating assessment, pedagogical documentation, family participation, transitions, and the need to prevent evaluative language from turning differences into deviations. It also examines how apparently descriptive records may reproduce comparisons and homogeneous expectations of development. The article argues for contextualized assessment attentive to singularities and to institutional conditions for participation, recognizing different ways of learning, communicating, playing and interacting. It concludes that assessment becomes pedagogically meaningful when it produces knowledge about children’s pathways while also prompting revision of proposals, supports and criteria used by educators.