Using the IDELA-Classroom Environment tool to monitor and improve ECCD center quality

• In Event: Monitoring for quality improvement in early childhood care and education settings

Proposal

This presentation reviews the development and application of a new addition to Save the Children’s suite of International Development and Early Learning (IDELA) toolkit. The IDELA-Classroom Environment (IDELA-CE) is a new tool designed to measure the quality of Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) centers. The development of the tool was motivated as a way to better unpack the results of impact evaluations by studying how interventions change the resources and instructional practices in ECCD centers. We also hoped to explore how classroom environments are correlated with child-level developmental outcomes.

We begin by briefly presenting the work to date on tool development, describing the core domains of General Center Resources, Emergent Literacy and Numeracy Environment and Instruction, and Instructor and Child Interactions. The tool was inspired by other quality tools such as the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS). Items from these and other similar tools were reviewed and adapted specifically to measure the changes and improvements in quality targeted by Save the Children’s Ready to Learn program, which focuses on play-based activities to improve children’s acquisition of foundational emergent literacy and mathematics skills. The tool fits within Save the Children’s IDELA toolkit which provides tools to measure child development as well as home and center environment outcomes and their contribution to child development.

While the tool was originally developed primarily as an assessment tool to better understand the pathways through which center-based programming improved child outcomes, we quickly understood its potential use for more periodic monitoring of fidelity of implementation to provide information necessary to relevant stakeholders for mid-course programmatic improvements.

This presentation covers this new usage of the tool which aims to provide relevant and actionable feedback:
1) to teachers directly after the observation through one on one coaching aided by automated coaching messages based on performance;
2) to program managers to understand the “bird’s eye” view of center quality in near-realtime through accessible dashboards that point to areas of strength and weakness and changes over time and;
3) to policy actors to recommend actions and considerations for improvements of quality of ECD services alongside strategies to increase access.

We conclude by discussing the challenges of quality monitoring. We include brief descriptions of the correlations found between the IDELA child tool and the IDELA-CE and discuss the limitations that sample size, internal consistency, and inter-rater reliability pose to data quality and actionability, along with planned solutions that balance a simple and easy-to-use tool with data quality and fidelity of observation.

Authors

• Jonathan Seiden, Save the Children

• Caroline Dusabe, Save the Children