Abstract:

The development of school proposals for educational innovation, designed from the Project-Based model and focused on the Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology, is increasingly growing in the context of Pre-school Education. In fact, educational innovation is a trend in the Spanish Departments of Education (local and regional). However, it has not been possible to design instruments and procedures that allow evaluating the quality and relevance of these projects based on scientific, pedagogical, didactic and systemic criteria. In other words, currently there are no tools to carry out a scientific inventory that contains evaluation criteria and standards for innovation proposals. These are the objects of study and the problems faced by this research. We answer questions about what aspects, criteria and dimensions for evaluation purposes should be considered at schools, in the context of innovation projects, as well as the characteristics of the evaluation tools that are used by educational institutions, in order to determine both, quality and scientific pertinence. The objective of the study is twofold: on the one hand, to provide a specific theoretical framework for the development of evaluation proposals and, on the other hand, to provide the results of a longitudinal empirical investigation, in a school context, in which a tool for the evaluation of innovation projects has been designed, put into practice and tested during six school years. The tool is called: “Scientific Inventory of Quality and Relevance (SIQR)”. This tool has been tested for its efficiency and functionality, within the framework of the development of an innovation project for pre-school education. The research is developed within the framework of a doctoral thesis from the Action research (AR) paradigm, based on the Didactic Engineering (DE) design method, and evaluation models of plans and programmes. The results indicate that the theoretical foundations of the evaluation are related to the dimensions: epistemological (the way of understanding innovation); institutional (the school educational project); formative; pedagogical and didactics; curricular; educational participation; psychosocial (such as the motivation of the subjects) and; generation of specific resources and progressive application. Likewise, at the experimental level, the results show that it is necessary to design some instruments to evaluate the project-programme upon which it is conceived, including a formative guiding evaluation instrument and that the evaluation criteria collected by the tools should be multifactorial and multilevel.

Keywords:

Pre-school education, educational innovation, Project-Based model, Project Based Learning, Evaluation of innovation projects.