Early childhood education aims to provide all children with the best possible support and encouragement. In daycare centers, educators observe and record the individual requirements of each child and assess their abilities. The research project "Observation and documentation in daycare centers in NRW" (BeDo-NRW) examines the challenges of good observation and documentation in daycare centers in North Rhine-Westphalia. The aim is to simplify the procedure for observation and documentation in daycare centers. Among other things, this should relieve the burden on the dedicated staff in the facilities so that they have more time to support the children.

In an initial project phase, BeDo-NRW examined the many observation and documentation procedures used in daycare centers. One of the results is that professionals feel burdened or even unsettled by the large number of procedures that can be used for documentation.

For this reason, the second phase of the research project (BeDo II NRW) is now focusing on making work processes simpler and more sustainable in order to ensure closer monitoring of the children. This project phase will make a decisive contribution to ensuring and further developing quality in daycare centers by training specialist advisors as multipliers with targeted training courses to support providers and daycare centers in the selection and, if necessary, reduction of BeDo procedures.

The training is offered by the Fliedner University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf as part of the project and consists of two training days of 5 hours each to apply the BeDo-NRW orientation guide developed in the first project phase

Fliedner University of Applied Sciences invites you to a kick-off event on October 1, 2025 from 2:00 to 4:00 pm. The event will take place online and will include detailed information about the schedule and content of the training days as well as an introduction to the research results of BeDo NRW.

Participation is possible here: To participate

Meeting ID: 346 289 395 155 8

ID: 4mN6ko75

The training events, which will take place both online and in face-to-face format, will start in October 2025. You can register for the training course here: Register

Das Ministerium für Kinder, Familie, Flüchtlinge und Integration des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (MKFFI) hat diese Ausgangslage im Bereich der Beobachtung und Dokumentation zum Anlass genommen, das Forschungsprojekt Beobachtung und Dokumentation in Kindertageseinrichtungen in Nordrhein-Westfalen (BeDo NRW) zu fördern. Das Forschungsprojekt BeDo-NRW sollte einen Beitrag leisten, die Dokumentationsformen kindlicher Bildungs- und Entwicklungsprozesse in Nordrhein-Westfalen sichtbar zu machen. Dabei wurden die Anwendungsprozesse der Verfahren und die daraus resultierenden Herausforderungen im pädagogischen Alltag untersucht. Die Frage, inwieweit solche Arbeitsprozesse entlastet und damit ökonomischer und nachhaltiger gestaltet werden können, standen dabei im Mittelpunkt der Forschung. Das Projekt verfolgte das Ziel, Orientierungswissen zu Beobachtungs- und Dokumentationsaufgaben von kindlichen Bildungs- und Entwicklungsprozessen zusammenzutragen, um darauf aufbauend die Komplexität zu reduzieren. Das Forschungsprojekt wurde im Zeitraum von Juni 2018 bis Mai 2020 von der Fliedner Fachhochschule in Düsseldorf unter der Leitung von Fr. Prof. Dr. Sonja Damen durchgeführt.

Since the introduction of the education and orientation plans, observation and documentation have become an important quality feature of educational work in childcare facilities. However, the implementation of this educational mandate is characterized by various challenges. In educational practice, several instruments are used in parallel, often pursuing the same goal and causing duplication of work. Equally unclear in many cases is the organization of documentation work in everyday pedagogical practice in terms of the time required or the frequency of observations and their evaluation, as well as the aim of the documentation work and thus the question of for whom (addressee professional, child or parent) is documentation actually carried out. These challenges encourage uncertainties and application errors in the observation procedures (e.g. too frequent observations, too extensive documentation, double recording of skills, etc.). The Ministry of Children and Youth has taken this initial situation in the field of observation and documentation as an opportunity to fund the research project Observation and Documentation in Child Day Care Facilities in North Rhine-Westphalia (BeDo NRW). The BeDo-NRW research project was intended to contribute to making the forms of documentation of children's education and development processes in North Rhine-Westphalia visible. The application processes of the procedures and the resulting challenges in everyday educational practice were examined. The research focused on the extent to which such work processes can be relieved and thus made more economical and sustainable. The aim of the project was to compile orientation knowledge on observation and documentation tasks for children's education and development processes in order to reduce complexity on this basis. The research project was carried out between June 2018 and May 2020 by the Fliedner University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf under the direction of Prof. Dr. Sonja Damen.

The aim of the research project was to develop an orientation guide for educational practice on the subject of observation and documentation based on the research findings. The BeDo-NRW orientation guide provides specialist advisors and managers with a handbook for the process-oriented quality development of observation and documentation processes in childcare facilities. In conjunction with the central research findings, it presents, among other things, materials for self-evaluation (e.g. checklists and reflection questions) that aim to improve the quality of observation and documentation processes in child daycare facilities. The orientation guide is only available in a digital version. In a further developed form, the orientation guide now forms the basis for the implementation phase, which will start in 2025.

Das Ziel des Forschungsprojektes war die Entwicklung eines Orientierungsleitfadens für die pädagogische Praxis zum Thema Beobachtung und Dokumentation auf der Grundlage der erhobenen Forschungsergebnisse. Der Orientierungsleitfaden BeDo-NRW bietet Fachberatungen und Leitungen eine Handreichung für die prozessorientierte Qualitätsentwicklung der Beobachtungs- und Dokumentationsprozesse in Kindertageseinrichtungen. In Verbindung mit den zentralen Forschungsergebnissen werden unter anderem Materialien zur Selbstevaluation (z.B. Checklisten und Reflexionsfragen) vorgestellt, die das Ziel verfolgen, die Qualität von Beobachtungs- und Dokumentationsprozessen in Kindertageseinrichtungen zu verbessern. Der Orientierungsleitfaden ist ausschließlich in einer digitalen Fassung erhältlich.