Including children’s perspectives in program evaluation: A scoping review protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Young children’s perspectives are essential in evaluating early learning and childcare (ELCC) programs, yet data collection methods to ethically and effectively include their voices are underdeveloped. With increasing public investment in Canadian ELCC, understanding evaluation practices that meaningfully engage children aged 0–6 is critical. Objectives: This scoping review aims to map and describe the range of data collection methods used to engage young children’s opinions and perspectives in program evaluations, identify settings where children’s perspectives are included, and highlight ethical considerations reported in these evaluations. Eligibility Criteria: Peer-reviewed evaluation studies published in English that incorporate data collection and reporting of perspectives from children aged six and under within any program or service setting will be included. Grey literature, non-evaluative studies, and studies focusing on older children or adult proxies will be excluded. Information Sources: Searches will be conducted in four electronic databases (SCOPUS, ERIC, APA PsycInfo, Child Development and Adolescent Studies) and supplemented with Google Scholar. Searches will be restricted to peer-reviewed English-language publications. Charting Methods: Study selection, data extraction, and charting will be conducted by multiple reviewers using Covidence software. Data extracted will include data collection methods, program settings, ethical issues, and participant details. Synthesized findings of descriptive numerical summaries and qualitative thematic analysis will be included. Results: Results will present an overview of data collection methods relevant for evaluation that engage young children’s perspectives and outline program contexts where these methods were used. The result will include reported ethical considerations, accompanied by tables and narrative summaries. Conclusions: The review will inform evaluators and program providers on current practices and gaps regarding young children’s involvement in evaluations, guiding future research and culturally appropriate evaluation methods. Funding: No external funding.
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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 | 0.206 | 0.158 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.090 | 0.022 |
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".