Assessing Children's Learning in Early Childhood Education: An Integrative Literature Review of Assessment and Documentation Practices in Russia and Aotearoa New Zealand

This dissertation examines how children's learning is assessed and documented in early childhood education (ECE) in Russia and Aotearoa New Zealand, as represented in policy, scholarship, and related documentary sources. Employing an integrative literature review supported by autoethnographic reflection, the study draws on my dual positioning as a former ECE methodologist in the Russian preschool sector and as a parent navigating the Aotearoa New Zealand ECE system, using this situated perspective as an interpretive and reflexive lens throughout.

The review addresses one primary research question and three supporting questions, asking what theoretical and pedagogical assumptions underpin assessment practices in each context, how national curricula and policy frameworks, including Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996, 2017) and Russia's federal curriculum and policy frameworks, shape those practices, and what tensions, contrasts, and points of resonance emerge when the two systems are considered together.

The Russian system emerged from cultural-historical theory and federal standardisation into a framework, formalised through FGOS DO, FOP DO, and the 2023 methodological recommendations, that positions assessment as developmental and non-attestational at the policy level, while local institutional materials reveal a more structured enactment oriented towards school readiness and civic-value formation. The Aotearoa New Zealand system, in contrast, grew from the bicultural, sociocultural curriculum Te Whāriki into an approach centred on narrative documentation, most visibly through Learning Stories, that positions children as already competent and confident learners; the review also traces tensions around validity, dispositional narrowing, and political pressure on this non-prescriptive curriculum.

Brought into dialogue in a synthesis chapter, the two systems are found to share a theoretical ancestor in Vygotsky despite growing in markedly different directions, and each is found to make a particular kind of visibility possible at the expense of another: diagnostic assessment renders a system legible at the cost of the individual child, while narrative assessment renders each child’s learning visible over time, without aiming to compare children with one another. Variability in assessment tools is present within both contexts, arising for structurally different reasons, the absence of a single mandated national assessment tool in one case and a deliberate philosophical non-prescription in the other. Whether national standardisation is desirable is itself contested, and is considered here in relation to children's rights.

The dissertation concludes that assessment is never a neutral technical exercise but is always an answer, however partial or unstated, to a prior question about what early childhood education is for and whose interests it is ultimately designed to serve. A children's rights framework, such as the UNCRC (1989), is offered as one practical tool through which ECE leaders and policymakers in both contexts might evaluate their assessment practices against the child's right to full development. The dissertation contributes a transnational, autoethnographically informed perspective to a field in which Russian and Aotearoa New Zealand scholarship on ECE assessment has largely developed in isolation from one another, with implications for policymakers, ECE leaders, teachers, families, and future research.