Description

This project (EduSE-Educators' Self-Evaluation) aspires to provide to the educational community an innova-tive way for the self-evaluation of early educators. Advanced and innovative statistical methods will be ap-plied in the educational evaluation domain, in order to develop an educator self-evaluation instrument. The Discrete Choice Modelling (DCM) is the selected method for the development of the instrument. This meth-od, which gave to Dan McFadden, who introduced it, a Nobel prize in 2000 in Economic sciences, is widely used in marketing, finance, biostatistics and other scientific areas, while its use in education is still very sparse.
 With the implementation of the DCM method in early childhood education (ECE), the EduSE project will de-velop an online self-evaluation instrument to support early educators evaluate their teaching competencies. Researchers with high expertise in the domains of statistics, research methods, evaluation, ECE and physical education will cooperate throughout the project’s lifecycle. When the development of a valid and reliable in-strument is completed, the self-evaluation instrument will be disseminated to the national and international educational community.

Goals

Aim of the project
 The basic aim of this project is to develop and introduce an innovative self-evaluation method based on advanced statistical technique for early educators, which in turn will support the improvement of their practices.
 Objectives
 (a) One of the objectives of the project has to do with the development of an innovative instrument for self-evaluation (Educator Self-Evaluation Instrument), which will be based on the DCM method. This method, which is widely used in econometrics and marketing will be implemented in ECE for the first time. The focus is to be identified in a very reliable manner the educational needs of educa-tors in a specific domain, the domain of using effectively physical activities in ECE.
 (b) To provide feedback to early educators about their teaching profiles. The completion of the Edu-cator Self-Evaluation Instrument will provide to early educators feedback about the way they use physical activities and it will facilitate them in their effort to improve their teaching competencies in this domain. This instrument will combine the recording of educators’ educational needs together with the confirmation that an advanced statistical modelling procedure has to offer.