Gathering Observational Data

Observing and documenting children's learning is an important part of the role of preschool educators. Documentation is often gathered through portfolios, photographs and learning stories. While these approaches capture valuable information about children's strengths, interests and learning styles, additional forms of observation may be needed in some circumstances. This is particularly relevant for children who may have developmental difficulties.

Observations that provide accurate and objective information about how the child is functioning across all domains and environments is essential to support individual planning for children with additional needs. Tools such as checklists, time samples, Antecedent, Behaviour, Consequence (ABC) charts or other specific forms of data collection that enable more in depth information to be gathered may also be necessary to develop and evaluate individual learning plans. Detailed information is vital to parents, educators and other stakeholders, such as paediatricians, psychologists and for funding applications (such as high learning support needs (HLSN) funding applications), to help these stakeholders understand challenges the child is experiencing in the preschool context and what support the child may benefit from. In the case of HLSN funding applications based on observations relating to children's behaviour, it is important to be able to provide a collection of observations that show the intensity, frequency and duration of behaviour of concern at preschool.

As educators, observations form the basis upon which interpretation and subsequent planning occur. Both observation and interpretation are important processes, but they should be separate and clearly defined as they serve distinct roles.

Observations are what the observer experiences with their senses, while interpretation is what the observer has inferred from the experiences.

Observations need to be clear, descriptive, specific and avoid subjective comments. The reader needs to be able to apply their interpretations as a separate process, as this interpretation is speculative (even when they are based on good knowledge of the child and developmental norms). All interpretations are based on the knowledge, expertise and focus the reader applies to the observation and therefore two readers may extract significantly different interpretations of what data means. Strong observational data does not make assumptions; while interpretations inherently have some level of assumption and judgement of what is being seen. At times educators may need to summarise what has been observed to make it clear to the reader (such as in a developmental summary report), however even then, statements should be devoid of interpretative comments.

When providing information to stakeholders, it is particularly important that observational data is presented factually. There may be times where educator interpretations may also need to be provided (such as if you were discussing with a parent why a set of observations were leading you to be concerned about the child’s development or if a professional asked for your interpretation on what was observed) but there should always be a clear distinction between the observations and the interpretations applied to them.

While observations should always be objective, this is especially important where concerns around development or child-protection are evident, as these may need to be shared with other parties and sometimes even in a court of law (read more about this here).

Here are some examples of the difference between strong, clear observations (factual and objective) and more interpretative (subjective) statements.

National Quality Standard links for the content on this page:

QA1 Educational Program and Practice

1.3.1 Assessment and Planning Cycle

1.3.3 Information for families