Ministry of Education.

This New Zealand project was intended to develop and test a framework for early child care practitioners to undertake their own evaluation of implementation of Te Whariki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, in a range of early child care centers. This report marks the completion of the project's phase 1, involving focus group interviews and consultations, and phase 2, involving ethnographic studies completed in seven early childhood centers. The report describes the consultations and methodologies, but also includes insight into processes and stages of the development of a proposed framework for evaluation. The final section of the report outlines an approach to evaluation that would be the starting point of the action research in phase 3 of the project. The report's six appendices include a discussion document on connecting assessment to evaluation, questions for the focus group interviews, and "trees " for categorizing observational data. (LBT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document