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 for Children, Family, Refugees and Integration of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKFFI) 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 Daycare 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 offers specialist advisors and managers a handbook for the process-oriented quality development of observation and documentation processes in child daycare facilities. In conjunction with the key research findings, it presents, among other things, materials for self-evaluation (e.g. checklists and reflection questions) with the aim of improving the quality of observation and documentation processes in child day care facilities. The orientation guide is only available in a digital version.