Bridging the research–practice divide in exploring early childhood education quality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on a growing body of international literature that conceptualises early childhood education (ECE) quality as a culturally constructed rather than a universal notion, this colloquium discusses how quality is being investigated in China, a country where ECE research has grown exponentially in recent years. The colloquium is structured into two main sections, highlighting the differing approaches to quality inquiry among Chinese academic researchers and practitioners, respectively. Whilst many Chinese academic researchers still adopt positivist paradigms, viewing quality as an objective reality, they extend frameworks by developing localised quality standards that foreground cultural considerations. Researchers’ work is often published in high-impact English-language journals, reflecting their engagement with global discourses whilst addressing Chinese contextual specificities. In contrast, Chinese ECE practitioners employ methods that transcend positivism through action research, commentaries and reflective papers. Some practitioner-led explorations offer nuanced, practice-informed, locally situated perspectives to construct ECE quality. However, practitioners’ views are mainly published in Chinese lower-tier journals with limited international visibility. We argue that academic researchers and practitioners select divergent paradigms and methods to investigate ECE quality, producing different types of knowledge. Lack of collaboration among them may lead to fragmented definitions, hindering coherent improvement of ECE practices. A critical next step would involve integrating Chinese researchers’ and practitioners’ perspectives more rigorously to conceptualise the multifaceted and context-specific nature of ECE quality. Insights gained from China can inform international dialogues about ECE quality around the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.127 | 0.082 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".