Page - 66 - in ElFo - Elementarpädagogische Forschungsbeiträge, Volume Jahrgang 3 / Heft 1 / 2021

Indicators of educator-child-interaction quality in early childhood education ElFo – Elementarpädagogische Forschungsbeiträge (2021), 3 (1), S. 61-76 66 In order for the instrument to be effective, it was decided early on in the developmental phase of the GrazIAS, that specific requirements had to be met. GrazIAS measures the pedagogical work of each individual childhood educator. The observation period is set at around four hours so that the entire everyday life can be represented. To simplify the input, an app was devel- oped. The automated output provide feedback on the individual and team level and the as- sessment and feedback concentrated on each single aspect examined in the GrazIAS proce- dure. In addition, the instrument needed to be applicable in a multilingual environment was clear from the beginning that can easily be supplemented by other languages due to the technical implementation. The tool has in fact been used internationally (in Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Hungary), in such projects as the Erasmus+ project Qualimentary (Pölzl- Stefanec & Projektgruppe, 2019-2021), and the data thus acquired has been fed into the Gra- zIAS database at the University of Graz. This remains an open educational resource and is – besides the OER regarding the theory - available to the professional community for research purposes. Method of the EIK Study Detailed data on interaction quality were collected during the EIK study (Effekte der Inter- aktionsqualität auf Krippenkinder). The following research question is addressed in this article: What is the level of educator-child interaction quality in Austrian nurseries? Sample For the study, 29 Austrian nurseries in different regions were randomly selected from large cities (17.3%), towns (51.7%), and rural areas (31%). Each nursery group was visited for three periods of observation (in October 2018, and in February and June 2019). A total of 116 early childhood educators were observed. Of these, 55 were observed in all three of the measure- ment periods. It is the data obtained for these latter persons which is discussed and analyzed below. Education 30 pedagogical staff with professional training 25 staff with no professional training First language 49 German-speaking 6 other first language* Min Max M SD Age 20 60 36.54 12.18 Years of service 1 40 6.95 6.35 * Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Turkish and Hungarian Table 1: Details for the sample of 55 early childhood educators