Referencing the EYFS

You have a document like the old Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage and, even in e-format it was just a pdf, in effect an electronic copy that matched the hard copy cm² for cm² – nothing to it, really. You’d treat it like a book, so that in the text it would look like this:

mytext mytext mytext mytext mytext(QCA 2000) mytext mytext &c.

and in the references list it would look very straightforward, too:

QCA (2000), Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, Nottingham, DfES Publications

So, no worries.

But the new Early Years Foundation Stage presents a number of problems:

• The hard copy is really a collection of documents – a library of resources rather than one single publication, which will make straightforward Harvard referencing harder to follow;
• There are two e-format versions: the true electronic format version and the pdf version;
• The two versions differ, not in intent but in structure;
• The URL does not always change between pages, making a simple reference very much harder;
• The change between DfES and DCSF has made the author harder to refer to with any certainty.

Let’s look at the “true” electronic resource: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/ I’m going to call this the gateway page.

This URL takes you to not very much. If you go to About the Themes and Principles (the grey tab above Learning and Development), you get to a very useful and quotable but of text about themes and principles: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/principles/index.htm I think that we’d all like to cite this as a URL (a complete URL, of course, with “Accessed on” + the date following). But what does it look like in the references list?

If instead we were to go from the gateway page to Enabling Environments and go to 3.3, there are some things here to look at, maybe to cite, and the URL looks a bit different: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/3/3.htm However, whichever of the  links in the grey box to the left we click on, the URL stays the same.

So, how are we going to deal with this when referencing?

There are the problems.

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Here are my suggested solutions.

The Author is DCSF. Live with it.

Where the hard copy is being used, it is referred to by individual publication, and the whole pack treated as a set of documents rather than a single one.

Where there are subpages that do not change the URL, as in Creativity and Critical Thinking: Making Connections and Sustained Shared Thinking, the writer should expect the reader to be intelligent enough to find the right bit without having a tizzy. This would not, however, apply to the resources in the right-hand links which do lead, of necessity, to new URLs, and frequently lead the intrepid site explorer outside the DCSF entirely. On the same page, http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/4/3.htm for example, the link “Research Report: Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years” leads straight to the REPEY report of Iram Siraj-Blatchford, which would need a seprarte refernce, and the “Messy Play” takes us to a pdf from Bernadette Duffy, again with a new URL. Resources links may take the reader to sites as diverse as a Community Playthings Guide to Room Layout and the Childhood Bereavement Network.

The title is whatever the main title on the page is, but I would suggest that it’s preceded by Early Years Foundation Stage: this means that the individual publications occur out of actual published pack sequence and marked a, b, c, in alphabetical order by title. Something like this: mytext mytext mytext mytext mytext (DCSFa) mytext mytext &c.

Creativity and Critical Thinking (“Card” 4.3) could look like this: DCSF (2007a or b, or c)

And in the references list would appear as

DCFS (2007a) Early Years Foundation Stage, Creativity and Critical Thinking (4.3), http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/4/3.htm accessed on 21st April 2008.

 

Let’s see if this works. Thoughts, anyone?