This paper is about how ECERS (Early Childhood Environments Rating Scale) is transformed to Danish educational culture.

The core research question is:

How does ECERS rating scale provide supportive reflexive dialogues between staff members in order to create transition opportunities and changes in their pedagogical praxis?

ECERS is an international recognized rating scale to assess process quality in an early childhood or school age care group. Process quality consists of the various interactions that go on in a classroom between staff and children, staff, parents, and other adults, among the children themselves, and the interactions children have with the many materials and activities in the environment, as well as those features, such as space, schedule and materials that support these interactions.

 Process quality is assessed primarily through observation and has been found to be more predictive of child outcomes than structural indicators such as staff to child ratio and group size (Whitebook, Howes & Phillips, 1995).

In order to provide care and education that will permit children to experience a high quality of life while helping them develop their abilities, a quality program must provide for the three basic needs all children have:

• Protection of their health and safety
• Building positive relationships
• Opportunities for stimulation and learning from experience

No one component is more or less important than the others, nor can one substitute for another. It takes all three to create quality care. Each of the three basic components of quality care manifests itself in tangible forms in the program's environment, curriculum, schedule, supervision and interaction, and can be observed. These are the key aspects of process quality that are included in our environmental rating scales.

In the Danish context ECERS is used as both a quality assurance system used by supervisors from the municipality to guarantee standards, and as a tool to systematically development of the pedagogical praxis through observations, new research knowledge and reflexive dialogues by the professionals.  

Other researchers in the field of quality in pre-school may find an interest in in our study, because we put the light on transition of a general quality assessment system into a sudden cultural context. It takes a lot of empirical data a broad knowledge of the pedagogical culture in the specific area to make this transition valid.

Our study content development of 17 items from the original ECERS-R in corporation with the municipality of Viborg and 10 day care institutions in this area. The research is designed as action research. All of our scales have been developed in close collaboration with realistic field-based sites. They have good interrater reliability and validity, thus making them suitable for research and program evaluation, as well as program improvement efforts. Our scales define environment in a broad sense and guide the observer from each day care centre to assess the arrangement of space both indoors and outdoors, the materials and activities offered to the children, the supervision and interactions (including language) that occur and the schedule of the day, including routines and activities. The support offered to parents and staff is also included.

The study began in 2012 and was ended in 2014.  

The theoretical framework is composed of evaluations theory (realistic evaluation), positive psychology, communication theory and didactic pedagogical theory.

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