Conclusions and Discussion

Abstract

The eight chapters within the theme of curriculum and assessment reveal the long way from effective incidental to government-lead early childhood education. Within the early childhood curriculum implementation of assessment has a specific place. The same accounts for the role of play in early childhood education curriculum and assessment. Although play is presented as a site for assessment few clues on what to observe and to what purpose the observations are to be collected within the complexity of play are presented. Moreover, the consequences of seeing the child and teacher contribution as one dynamic system while carrying out a task requires much more awareness of the teacher’s role than currently is taken for granted. The chapters show that each of the countries has its own developmental trajectory with regard to development of early childhood curriculum. Political choices as well as facts such as prosperity of the country, money, professional knowledge and time to prepare preschool teachers profoundly on their most important work, each of those, influences how early childhood curriculum gets organized and implemented within a country. The role of well-grounded assessment while adjusting to preschool teachers’ opinion about how to work with young children and the role of keeping track of children’s progress is still modest in most countries. As to future research agendas on a more global level we must respect that profiting from other cultures when trying to make early childhood education effective within a specific country cannot succeed without respecting national issues. It could be that research findings sometimes are too optimistically applied to solve contextualized problems.