Abstract
From 2010 in Emilia Romagna Region (Italy) the institutional authority promoted a negotiation process of elaboration and subsequent experimentation of a participative approach to evaluation of educational services for early childhood. The experimentation, that involved public and private services, is aimed at the implementation of a regional system of quality regulation in public governance. Key features of the evaluation approach are its formative function and social characterization, the creation of a collaborative relationship beetween educational services within the process of self-evaluation and external evaluation, the possibility of a partial contextualization of evaluation tools and procedures and the recursive nature of the process.
Keywords
participatory evaluation; educational quality; educational services for early childhood