“La valutazione dei Servizi Educativi. Indagine sulla cultura valutativa nei servizi educativi rivolti alla prima infanzia”

In the wide range of Italian educational services the reality of services for early childhood is since a long time dedicate to evaluation issues. Since the nineties European institutions of documentations have developed conceptualizations and instruments to support an evaluation not reduced as a correspondence to standards set by the experts but that refers to a conception of quality as a multidimensional construct, result of a dynamic and continuous process. One of the crucial moments in the Italian scene, is the path of research and development on the evaluation of ECE services, started by the research group of the University of Pavia (Ferrari, Becchi, Bondioli, Livraghi, Gariboldi). The group began a path that will lead to the definition of an evaluation model called "formative" and "transformative": on one hand connected to experiences of research-training able to involve educators and teachers and on the other hand able to develop awareness by practitioners about possible latent issues. The peculiarity of the approach is the reference to those “micro” characters of the ECE contexts, to critically discuss about the quality of the educational environment in its daily reality. At the same way it has to be recognized the peculiar attention to the quality of the context, and thus an evaluative orientation not centered on the results achieved by children in compliance with educational programs and curriculum, but centered on criteria that define the quality of service on the whole. However, since their institution of daycare (l. 1044, 1971), some features of the present historic moment request a closer look on the evaluation culture in the ECE services, namely:  diversification of the service in the territory in economical and socio-cultural terms;  increasing of the number and the diversification of subjects that deal with them;  the emerging assessment policies, which lead to the accreditation and certification of the quality of services, and therefore also of the daycare. In this research the primarily attention is focused not in evaluation as simple application of tools, but rather as a path involving in the first instance those who gravitate around to the service , which therefore was born from the needs of the practitioners themselves. A pioneer in the opposition to the "preordained" assessment is Robert E. Stake, who comings out from the educational programs setting, criticizes the use of purpose as a criterion of judgment, following the path marked by the innovative Scriven, and also criticizes the imposition of a prior research design that flattens out the local and individual through standard. Therefore the Research Question is: wich kind of evaluation will be significant for the practitioners? This is the reason why the research aims to: gain a deep understanding of evaluation practice, models and cultures in early childhood services in a wide portion of Verona city and province; build, in a cooperative framework including researchers and professionals of a small sample of the services involved, guidelines for a context-sensitive evaluation model. The research has developed n. 7 case studies using qualitative methods: content analysis of professional documents; non-participant observation of daily practice of some of the contexts involved; interviews with the professionals; four parent support services also take part into a reflective workshop (12 hours) aiming to build the new guidelines. Interviews’ analysis showed some nodes related to the evaluation culture in the involved services:  daycare’s teachers gave hardly a clear definition of the concept of evaluation. They emphasize the evaluation’s emotional component, mainly marked by negative experiences, in some cases they even declare that this word doesn’t belong to the ECE services: they believe that it’s too hard and preferring terms such as observation for children and sharing, for the working group.  Evaluations’ systems coming out from outside services (accreditation, quality assurance) is the first reference in front of the term “evaluation”. It seems to have different engagement on each involved service, whose distinction is primarily related to the more or less widespread perception in educational staff: where there is a clear distinction of roles the engagement on daycare’s teachers could be almost absently, otherwise where there is a full sharing of all the aspects which characterize a nest, like in cooperative’s reality, the engagement on staff would be more widespread and sensed. However if for some more structured reality this kind of evaluation is only an additional workload and barely significant, for other realities it has made possible to open up new areas of thought in the service related to the evaluation, changing aspects of the service until now scarcely considered, such as the documentation. A special tool for these forms of assessment considered as positive, or at least interesting for the service, is the questionnaire to the parents, which allows to collect information in a historical moment in which the participation of parents in services’ life is compromised by diversified daily rhythms and therefore not exactly conducive to shared meeting of more subjects.  It comes out a lack of availability of spaces and times potentially dedicated to a moments of evaluation, intended as reflective practice, instead absorbed, by other bureaucratic-administrative tasks and by the need to offer a very high number of hours to the work of care.  Regarding the meaning of the evaluation, it comes out a widespread awareness about the instrumental use of evaluation, which means the use of what has been learned through the evaluation for the improvement of the practices and in general for the service. However, that use remain something ideal, poorly accompanied by methodological considerations, namely the identification of how to collect information and then draw conclusions useful for the improvement. Where this happens, thanks to the presence of tools such as observation grids, it reveals however a lack of recognition of what is produced in terms of knowledge and suggestions, because the potential changes regarding a decisional field which is at a higher level, and that seems not to enhance enough the product . Possible conclusions from the data analysis and literature lead to two main conditions of the services, neither of which is facilitating the development of an assessment rooted in the practices and therefore able to increase the quality more than certify whether or not the level, with scarcely significant manner: 1) a deeply problematic structural condition of the services, partly due to the actual highly critical socio-economic phase, which as well as greatly reduce the available resources to the services also requires formal assessment (accreditation, quality) without actually recognize the weight of these tasks for the daily management of the service and reducing care’s moments; 2) following the interviews and in comparison with the available (international and national) scientific literature, it emerges a culture of evaluation that can be defined as "naive", namely it’s often informed by personal experiences but rarely accompanied by profound and shared reflections. It prevails also a negative connotation of the term, since it is associated with judgment, controls and any formalities compulsory but necessary for the survival of the service. This second conclusion invites us to consider the above as a training need of the services, aimed at an improving of educational practices in which the evaluation could take a “significant” status, namely consistently associated to the practice. It’s not possible however to ignore the limits imposed by the organization of services itself, which greatly reduces the possibility of identifying training’s areas and prevent the subsequent professional welfare of teachers.