According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have the right to participate in all matters and contexts affecting them (Lansdown, 2005). Although little empirical evidence exists on this topic, research highlights the importance of taking into account children’s voices when assessing preschool settings quality (Katz, 1998). Moreover, the positive relationship between children's participation and the quality of preschool contexts is documented and it is also recognized that teachers’ and children’s experiences of participation shape and impact each other (Sheridan, 2007). Within this framework, we aim to investigate the associations between teacher’s perceptions and children’s ideas (i.e., conceptions, expectations, and perceptions) about children’s participation right, while testing for the moderating role of classroom quality (controlling for structural and sociodemographic variables). Participants were (a) 29 preschool teachers who filled in the questionnaire on “Teacher’s perceptions about the implementation of children’s participation right in preschool settings”, (b) 29 preschool classrooms of the Lisbon area, observed with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008), and (c) 168 typically developing children attending those classrooms, interviewed with “Choosing classrooms: A structured interview on children's participation right", during the 2015/2016 school year. Multilevel analysis will be conducted and preliminary results presented. Prior findings suggest the CLASS and the measure on “Teacher’s perceptions about the implementation of children’s participation right in preschool settings” yield internally consistent indicators and are intercorrelated (Correia, Lopes, & Aguiar, 2014) and positive significant associations were found between both teacherchild interactions’ quality and children’s ideas about participation, and teacher-child interactions’ quality and teacher’s perceptions of participation practices (Correia, Fialho & Aguiar, 2016). We expect to contribute to the understanding of children’s ideas about participation and to the discussion on whether it should be considered as a criterion for the assessment of preschool quality.

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