Evaluating Swedish Preschool Teachers’ Documentation Practices Since the 2010 Curriculum Review Using Sheridan’s Competency Rubrics A Systematic Literature Review from 2011-2019

Preschool documentation has been a recent topic in Sweden amongst preschool teachers, preschool managers, education policymakers, and researchers. Interest in this topic is driven in part by the 2010 revision of the Swedish preschool curriculum that introduced requirements concerning the use of documentation in follow-up, evaluation, and development activities in preschool. Of particular interest is the relative open-ended quality of the language describing the requirements in the curriculum as to how these documentation practices should be enacted. What kinds of documentation preschool teachers adopt and implement in their pedagogical practices is therefore a key question. Research by Vallberg-Roth (2012) has shown that some preschool teachers in Sweden document in a number of locally unique ways, in order to strive for curriculum-specific goals on one hand, and ensure child learning and development on the other. Learning and development can be described in terms of teacher’s competency rubrics proposed by Sheridan et al. (2011). These rubrics are analytic tools in preschool teachers’ documentation processes. This systematic review examines different kinds of documentation practices as they are described in selected articles and finds documentation types to include; pedagogical, systematic, teacher binders, and use of portfolios, as well as other techniques used by preschool teachers to document. This review implies that documentation is multi-faceted partly due to the uncertainty surrounding how to carry out its processes as well as the need to meet the individual needs of every child. In line with already defined competency types by Sheridan et al. (2011), which include knowing what and why, knowing how, and interactional, relational and transactional competences, the thesis also tentatively relates documentation types within the reviewed articles to teachers’ competency, thereby laying a possible foundation for the improvement of preschool teaching in Sweden.