Online Glossary Letter E

Glossary-Items: Letter E

Early learning diagnostic assessment: Early learning diagnostic assessment is a form of educational assessment that is applied during early childhood. It aims to assess a child’s level of development and learning processes and thus recognize the child’s abilities. It provides the basis for successful cooperation with the child and a way of drawing conclusions for organizing the child’s learning processes and giving them individualized support.

Early school enrollment: Early school enrollment (in German: “vorzeitige Einschulung”) is an accelerated learning measure. It involves children starting their education —as a result of being more advanced developmentally—before they reach compulsory schooling age in Germany. This might be due to their high cognitive ability.

Early service learning: “Early service learning” (in German: “Frühes Service Learning”), which could also be described as “learning and helping others”, is a method used in early education where children actively gain knowledge and then share their learning experiences and knowledge with other children or other people so that everyone profits from it.

Educational and Learning Stories: Educational and Learning Stories use a resource-oriented, observation-based approach to document development. They make children's learning processes and individual interests visible. Through systematic observation, documentation, analysis, and collegial exchange, practitioners gain comprehensive understanding of a child's learning interests and developmental status. On this basis, an appreciative and motivating narrative is written, which is shared with and reflected upon together with the child and their parents.

Educational assessment: Educational assessment in Kitas and schools aims to recognize a child’s talents thereby initiating an individual measure that provides the best possible support for the child. Educational assessment is based on techniques of observation that focus on dialogue and on the strengths of a child.

Enrichment: Enrichment is the generic term for tasks or projects in Kitas or schools that provide in-depth learning activities for gifted, highly gifted, and particularly high-achieving children and students. This allows them to go more deeply into the subject matter of their areas of interest.

Equality of opportunity: Equality of opportunity in the education system exists when all children and adolescents are supported in accordance with their interests, needs, and levels of development as well as their abilities. This should occur regardless of their socioeconomic and social background, their learning background, their gender, their culture, or their religion.

Executive Functions: Executive functions are core cognitive control processes that enable the deliberate regulation of thoughts, behavior, and emotions. They include skills such as the short-term storage and processing of information in working memory, inhibition (e.g., impulse control and suppression of distracting stimuli), and cognitive flexibility (e.g., adapting to new demands). Executive functions are particularly important for goal-oriented behavior, creative problem solving, and coping with unfamiliar or complex situations.

Expertise: Expertise refers to particularly comprehensive knowledge and unique problem-solving skills in a certain area that a person has acquired as the result of many years of intensive and systematic practice. Expertise enables children and adolescents to perform on above-average levels and to develop their talents. Expertise can also exist in one unique area of ability.