Poster #120 - Examining the Relationship of Quality in Family Childcare Homes and Children’s School-Readiness Outcomes

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Methods, History, Theory

Integrative Statement

Research has demonstrated that the quality of childcare children receive is related to children’s developmental outcomes (Porter et al., 2010), therefore states have begun to invest in formal systems to improve quality, called Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) (National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance, N.D.; Riley, Roach, Adams, & Edie, 2005). Many QRIS programs administer Environment Rating Scales, including the Family Day Care Environment Rating Scale (FDCRS), expensive copyrighted assessments, to assess quality within family childcare homes. After conducting such assessments, interventions are implemented to improve quality of the children’s environment at family childcare homes, but it is not clear that a global quality score is the most appropriate way to represent quality (Schacck et al., 2013). Indeed, there is not a strong conceptual model for understanding quality in family child care settings (Tonyan, Paulsell, Shivers, 2017; Blasberg, Bromer, Porter, Shivers, Tonyan & Weber, in preparation). This study first explores the factor structure of quality in FDCRS, and second it examines the measure’s relationship to children’s Bracken school-readiness scores.

The Quality Interventions for Early Care and Education (QUINCE) study provided data appropriate to examine both the factor structure of quality and the association between quality and children’s school readiness. The QUINCE study measured quality with the FDCRS and changes in children’s school readiness (i.e., Bracken School Readiness) from the fall (Time 1) to the spring (Time 2) of the same year. We performed exploratory then confirmatory factor analyses on Time 1 FDCRS scores at 336 sites using EQS. This proposed factor structure was then used to examine two structural equation models (SEM) predicting Bracken School Readiness scores at Time 2 for 646 children. To account for the multilevel data, average school readiness scores for each site were used. Model 1 included the six FCDRS factors predicting Bracken Time 2 scores, with Bracken Time 1 scores as a covariate. Model 2 also included the six FDCRS factors with Bracken Time 1 as a predicting variable.

We found that the best SEM for Bracken scores at Time 2 was Model 1 (see Figure 1) which included Bracken Time 1 scores as a covariate. The fit indices for the three models tested are included in Table 1. The factor structure showed that there are six components of quality and only 27 items out of the 34 items on the FDCRS are adequate for measuring quality in family childcare homes. This proposed factor structure fits better than the factor structure proposed by the QUINCE final report (Bryant et al, 2009). Furthermore, this model shows that quality in family childcare homes is related to school-readiness scores and there are multiple points of improvement for QRIS programs to target during interventions, such as provider classes, workshops, coaches, and more.

Authors

• Kirsten Marianne Reyna, California State University, Northridge
  Presenting Author

• Holli Tonyan, CSUN
  Non-Presenting Author