Enriching and evaluating infant-toddler educational practice through co-designed tools

This research aimed to co-design a Pedagogical Documentation Assessment Tool (PDAT) to assess the quality of infant-toddler educators' practice. The PDAT is a critical component of the evaluation of the Observe, Reflect, Improve Children’s Learning (ORICL) project, funded by the Australian Research Council. The ORICL digital tool was co-designed to support and strengthen infant-toddler educational practice (Williams et al., 2023). Pilot work has demonstrated that ORICL provides opportunities for educators to develop specialist knowledge and skills in observing, reflecting and communicating the learning experiences of individual children (Elwick et al., 2023). The PDAT was designed to assess ORICL’s contribution to enhancing the quality of educators’ documentation of children’s learning, development and wellbeing. Principles of implementation science (Metz et al., 2014) informed the collaborative co-design of the ORICL tool and subsequently, the PDAT criteria for assessing the quality of educators’ documentation. The PDAT co-design process included: 1. Generating ideas about quality constructs of pedagogical documentation from literature and a stakeholder focus group. 2. Consolidating, and gauging levels of agreement about the purpose, principles, content and format of the PDAT, through a stakeholder survey. 3. Operationalising the agreed content into criteria and indicators in a rubric; 4. ‘Testing’ the rubric with stakeholders. Stakeholder participation was voluntary. All data were anonymised. Co-design generated an agreed purpose for the PDAT, principles for its use, and specific indicators of quality documentation. Beyond its use in the evaluation of ORICL, the PDAT has potential to support educator self-reflection, and professional development at pre-service and organisational levels.