Studies on quality in childhood education: a systematic review of the literature
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abstract
In this study a systematic review of the literature produced in Portugal during the last ten years
(2008-2018) on quality in childhood education is carried out. The methodology follows the line of
Kitchenham and Mendes (2007). For data collection, texts (doctoral theses, master dissertations
and scientific articles) were analyzed, available in the repositories and available online. For this
purpose, the RCAAP (Open Access Scientific Repositories in Portugal) was used, since it indexes
and contains the necessary metadata for the identification of the documents. We defined the
search terms that should be included in the title, keywords or abstract. The documents were then
retrieved and stored on the computer. In a brief analysis of the document, documents that were
not written in Portuguese, were not complete or could not be opened, or were not included in the topic were excluded. With the remaining documents, a text-mining characterization analysis was
performed, in order to identify the most significant and frequent terms. Based on these results, the
documents were automatically grouped by a!nity of text (clustering). Finally, the most relevant
document groups were selected and a content analysis was done. In this study the ethical
assumption was considerd. The analysis allowed to group the studies by the following categories:
criteria for thinking about quality, instruments for measuring quality and ways of evaluating and
collaboratively developing quality. This is an important work that systematizes the work developed
in the scope of the quality of the learning environments that can support future studies.
