Observation and Assessment in Early Childhood: A Teacher's Guide

Observation is the classroom's first information skill.

Before you can plan an activity, adjust a routine, or tell a family how the day went, you need to know what each child actually does — and watching on purpose, during the play and routines already happening, is how that knowledge gets built.

The record-keeping half of the job is official enough that the federal O*NET occupational profile for childcare workers lists it as a task: keep records on individual children, including daily observations and information about activities, meals served, and medications administered.

Every record a center keeps starts with someone noticing something.

The field's own framework gives the skill a central place.

NAEYC's position statement on developmentally appropriate practice (2020) says each child from birth through age 8 has the right to equitable learning opportunities in centers, family child care homes or schools, and it names individuality as one of its three core considerations, alongside commonality and context.

General knowledge of how young children develop takes a teacher only so far; observation is how a teacher learns the individual child in front of them.

There is a developmental reason the watching matters.

Harvard's Center on the Developing Child describes serve and return as the responsive back-and-forth exchanges between a young child and a caring adult that shape brain architecture — and you cannot return a serve you never noticed.

Noticing is the observational half of responsive teaching.

Observation also appears on the teacher's side of the credential ladder.

A Child Development Associate (CDA) verification visit from the Council for Professional Recognition follows what the Council calls the R.O.R.

Model — Review, Observe, Reflect — in which a Professional Development Specialist observes the candidate working with children, at the center or home where the candidate works or volunteers.

The skill you use to watch children is the same skill an assessor watches in you.

Finally, every assessment system a program runs is only as good as the evidence behind it.

An observational assessment such as GOLD is rated from documentation of what children do and say — and in an infant, toddler or preschool room, that documentation comes out of the ordinary day.

Someone has to collect it.

Teachers document through a handful of formats, each capturing a different kind of evidence.

None needs special equipment — a sticky note, a clipboard or a dated piece of artwork will do — and the skill is in what you choose to write down.

Anecdotal records are short, factual notes about one specific moment, written shortly after it happens and dated.

A note might read: "M. lined the cars up along the windowsill, counted each one under their breath, then held out the red car and said, 'you can have this one.'" It describes rather than judges — "lined up the cars" is evidence; "played nicely" is an impression.

Running records are the extended version: a continuous, time-ordered narrative of everything one child does across a stretch of free play or a specific activity, written as it happens.

The value is in sequence and detail — who the child approached first, what they tried when the tower fell, how the negotiation over the truck ended.

A running record suits the moments when a single anecdote cannot answer the question you have about a child's language, social behavior or problem-solving.

Checklists mark whether a skill or behavior is present, emerging or not yet observed.

They are quick and they cover the whole group, which makes them useful for spotting patterns — but a mark on a list cannot say how a child did something, so pair checklists with a written note that keeps the story.

Work samples are the children's own output: drawings, early attempts at writing a name, block structures photographed and dated as they change.

Kept in sequence, they show growth in a form narrative notes cannot.

Assembled over time, these formats become a child's documentation — the dated record a portfolio gathers, and the raw material an assessment tool rates.

A few habits keep it usable: date everything; separate what you saw from what you think it means; rotate your attention so the record covers the whole room, not just the children who demand your eye; and write briefly and often rather than rarely and at length.

Observation notes become assessment when they are rated against a framework.

The published systems each do a different job, and a program may run more than one kind at once.

Teaching Strategies GOLD is an online observational assessment for children from birth through third grade, rated against research-based objectives — Teaching Strategies cites 38.

Teachers document what children do and say, then rate that evidence, and the platform's checkpoint reports show which children are performing below, at, or above widely held expectations.

Our Teaching Strategies GOLD guide walks through the documentation side in detail.

California runs its own system.

The Desired Results Developmental Profile — DRDP (2025), the current version — is now fully implemented there for programs serving infants through Grade 3, run by the California Department of Social Services and the California Department of Education with WestEd.

A teacher in a California program may encounter DRDP rather than GOLD.

Some tools come bundled with a curriculum publisher.

GOLD comes from the same company as The Creative Curriculum for Preschool, which Teaching Strategies describes as a curriculum for 3- and 4-year-olds built on play-based studies.

The curriculum and the assessment are different products doing different jobs.

A separate family of tools rates the environment rather than the child.

The Environment Rating Scales are edition- and setting-specific: ECERS-3, published in 2015, assesses center-based programs for ages 3-5; ITERS-3, from 2017, covers center-based programs for birth through age 2; FCCERS-3, from 2019, covers home-based programs for ages birth through 12; and SACERS-U, from 2014, covers school-age care for ages 5-12.

A scale score describes a classroom or program, so these sit alongside child-level assessment rather than replacing it.

HighScope publishes the COR Advantage assessment; the HighScope pages we tried did not load, so our research could not verify its details — check HighScope's own materials before relying on any summary of it.

Which system a classroom uses usually follows the program rather than the individual teacher.

Ask in the interview or your first week which assessment platform your room runs, so the documentation expectations are not a surprise during your first rating period.

Screening and assessment answer different questions with different instruments.

A developmental screen is a brief, structured check whose results sort against cutoffs; an observational assessment is an ongoing record rated against objectives, built from documentation a teacher collects over time.

The ASQ-3 is a parent-completed developmental screener for ages 1-66 months.

Parents answer questionnaires covering communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving and personal-social skills, and the publisher says the questionnaires take parents 10-15 minutes to complete and professionals 2-3 minutes to score.

Because it is a screen, the output sorts rather than concludes: ASQ-3 results that fall near the cutoff land in a monitoring zone, which the publisher describes as a way to help track children at risk.

That language is deliberate — a screening result is a signal to keep watching, not a verdict on a child.

Social-emotional development has its own screener: ASQ:SE-2 screens social-emotional skills for ages 1-72 months with 9 questionnaires, and is meant to be used alongside ASQ-3 or another general developmental screener.

For a teacher, the practical difference is rhythm and ownership.

A screen is a snapshot taken at one point — the ASQ-3 questionnaires are completed by parents — while an observational assessment builds continuously from the documentation a teacher collects.

Screening flags which children may need a closer look; assessment describes what each child can do so you can plan for them.

When a screening result does raise a concern, what happens next follows your program's screening and referral policy — and a conversation with the family — not the score alone.

The endpoint of the paperwork is a teaching decision.

Assessment results feed a loop: what you know about each child decides what you offer next, and what they do with it becomes the next round of observations.

Run in that order, observing, assessing and planning reinforce each other; run out of order, and the documentation detaches from the classroom.

In Teaching Strategies GOLD, checkpoint reports show which children are performing below, at, or above widely held expectations.

Read at the room level, that is a map of the class — who clusters where, and which skill areas the group is moving through.

Read at the child level, it is a pointer for individual planning: areas below expectations become the next round of small groups and prompts, and areas above them are strengths to extend.

We could not confirm checkpoint timing: the Teaching Strategies product page we read does not list checkpoint dates, and our research did not verify a calendar.

Ask your director when your program's windows open and close, and plan documentation backward from those dates.

Results also feed the family conversation.

A dated record — notes, work samples, ratings — lets a teacher show a family what progress looks like in evidence rather than adjectives, which makes the conversation shorter and more useful for everyone in it.

For a job seeker, that loop is a skill worth naming in an interview: watch deliberately, document what you saw, and turn the results into a plan.

If you are building toward the role itself, the daycare teacher career guide covers the job, the settings and what you need to get hired, and daycare teacher jobs on ChildcareHires show what centers near you are hiring for.