Despite the acknowledged complexity of early childhood educators' work, little is documented about how early childhood educators actually spend their time at work. A typical way of studying time at work is through the use of time-use diaries. Recent developments have shown the benefits of using randomized sampling electronic time-use diaries. This…

When classroom observations are increasingly used for accountability and evaluation purposes, a deeper understanding of the psychometric properties of such measurement tools is needed. The present study took a unique approach to examine the psychometric properties of a commonly used classroom observation measure by testing the reliability of…

Early childhood educators are key to delivering early childhood education and care (ECEC) for the benefit of children, their families and society alike. For the benefits of ECEC to be realised, however, the educators who deliver these services need to be well. Despite growing attention to attracting and retaining a high-quality early childhood…

Home-based parental involvement in early education is linked to beneficial outcomes in children's development and may redress unequal educational outcomes associated with family background. The type of educational activities at home and the way parents provide their support may differ across parents with and without a migration background. It is…

Preschool, understood as being both a physical and psychological environment, is, according to objectives in national curriculum, required to be inclusive for all those who attend it. Previous studies have identified the stereotypical norms of several everyday activities of preschools, including both interactions and premises. The aim of this…

The e-portfolio is a tool increasingly used in Higher Education due to the benefits it holds, especially with regards to facilitating processes of evaluation and reflective learning. The main goal of this study was the construction of a questionnaire to analyse EP use in a Spanish University and to ensure its reliability and validity for use…

Stability is an important underlying assumption in any form of assessment-supported decision-making. Since early years development is frequently described as unstable, the concept plays a central role in the discussion surrounding early years assessment. This paper describes stability as a set of assumptions about the way individual scores change…

Whilst the importance of engaging with children's voices is now more widely recognized, there is still a dearth of representation of younger children's voices specifically. Visual methodological tools, such as photo-elicitation and photo-voice are used in research; however, there remains a lack of clarity about what they mean, how they are used,…

The present study aimed to investigate the associations between teachers' observed emotional support and social competence among Finnish pre-schoolers (6-year-olds). The quality of emotional support was observed using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System Pre-K in 47 preschool classrooms twice across the preschool year. Teachers rated children's…

The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a critical realist approach can add to our understanding of professional recognition of educators in a pre-school setting. Recognition is a function of personal achievement and social arrangement, and is understood through examining those subjective conditions and objective structures as…

Randomized control trials (RCTs) are commonly regarded as the 'gold standard' for evaluating educational interventions. While this experimental design is valuable in establishing causal relationships between the tested intervention and outcomes, reliance on statistical aggregation typically underplays the situated context in which interventions…

Researching quality in early childhood settings has been operationalized in many ways, within and across countries. Nevertheless, despite some consensus on what might constitute a universally recognized view of what is considered essential for young children's development, there are strong indicators that locally developed assessment tools are…

Using video as a mode of data generation in research involving young children and their teachers has become a more common practice in educational research. Digital video recordings provide the opportunity to capture the complexity of interactions that occur between people, time, space and objects, however, working with this methodology and form of…

We tested the criterion-related validity and potential bias of two measures of pupils' academic achievement: the Teacher Rating Scale (TRS) and the Mathematics and Literacy Achievement Tests (MLTs). These measures are representative of assessment methods largely used in the elementary school. The aims were: (1) to verify the extent to which TRS…

Growing numbers of educational researchers are using rhizoanalytic approaches based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to think differently in their research practices. However, as those engaging in debates about post-qualitative research suggest, thinking differently is not without its challenges. This paper uses three complex challenges…