observations and assessment
Reinforcing biases
A "conforming to society' position on early childhood curriculum can lead to the observations can merely educator's views dominating their programme. Educators' reinforce what they believe is important, because they focus on what they already think is significant and they interpret it in terms of what they already know. Educators observation see what they look for. Traditional techniques are thought to capture "real" events, avoiding the observer's selective attention. However, there is con- siderable debate about the extent to which we can observe a child objectively, as Mac Naughton and Faragher indicate:
The first stage of observing is looking at what a child is doing. This may seem simple and obvious. However, the process of looking at what a child is doing is extremely complex. There are several different ways of looking at the same event or behaviour. Most of us are familiar with the fact that witnesses to a crime or an accident often have different recollections of what happened or have noticed different aspects of the same event. Observing young children is beset with the same difficulties.