Three years after the end of the project ‘SEED: Social and Emotional Education and Development’, the Norwegian researchers from Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education, Trondheim, who participated in the project, together with ICDI’s former Senior Programme Manager Margaret Kernan, published an open-access article in ‘Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood’. It illustrates some of the challenges and dilemmas that Norwegian early childhood education and care teachers experienced when completing a global screening tool.
Based on interviews with 31 teachers, the authors present in-depth analysis of the critical reflections of 19 teachers concerning the assessment forms. While previous research has criticized standardized testing and screening in early childhood education and care, there is a need for the critical voices of practitioners to be heard. The aim of this article is to illustrate which aspects teachers find challenging and how they respond when in doubt. The authors found that teachers’ assessments are inextricably linked to the early childhood education and care context, and the values, ideas and norms that are prevalent in Nordic early childhood education and care settings.
Between 2017 and 2019, ICDI coordinated the project SEED, with the aim of exploring the psychosocial well-being and healthy development of young children (2,5 to 6 years old) in 5 European countries, with an emphasis on those growing up in difficult circumstances.
We did this by conducting a country level screening of psychosocial well-being of 5-year-old children in Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, the Netherlands, and Norway, using the UPSI-5 tool developed by ICDI. Based on the findings, we implemented an innovative continuing development programme to build practitioners capacities to support psychosocial well-being.
The Report, the multilingual summaries, the Guidelines for practitioners in 6 languages are all available here.
