Advancing the Measurement of Early Care and Education Quality to Support Young Children’s Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Developmental research has consistently found that high-quality early education and care (ECE) has important and long-lasting consequences for children’s academic and social-emotional development (Burchinal et al., 2008; Hamre, 2014; Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2001). Yet, there is less consensus on how to define and measure high-quality ECE. The four papers in this panel present advances in measuring ECE quality through observational tools.

Three studies compare one of the most common measures of ECE interactional quality, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ Pre-K (CLASS™, Pianta et al. 2008), to three newer quality measures that capture finer grained interactions: EduSnap, which measures how teachers structure the day, introduce content, and use pedagogical strategies to support children’s learning (Ritchie et al 2014); The Simple Interactions Tool (Li, 2014; Akiva et. al., 2020), which assesses the quality of adult-child interactions across four dimensions: Connection, Reciprocity, Inclusion, and Opportunity to Grow; and the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-3 (ECERS-3 Harms et al. 2015), which measures global quality with increased focus on interactions that support cognitive development. Some of these studies also explore associations between these newer quality measures and children’s outcomes. The remaining study focuses on the CLASS pre-K to understand how study procedures, including observer training, affect classroom quality scores.

Taken together, these papers refine measures of ECE quality; such efforts are important given a meta-analysis found only modest associations between the CLASS pre-K and children’s outcomes (Perlman et al. 2016). Better measurement systems will more effectively support ECE quality improvement to strengthen young children’s development.

Sub Unit

• School Readiness/Childcare

Chair

• Jessica Harding, Mathematica Policy Research - New Jersey

Individual Presentations

• Validating the Simple Interactions Tool as a Measure of Interaction Quality in Early Education and Care Settings - Presenting Author: Lily S Fritz, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Emily Hanno, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City; Non-Presenting Author: Junlei Li, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Non-Presenting Author: Nonie K Lesaux, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Exploring Two Differing Approaches to Measuring Children’s Preschool Classroom Experiences - Presenting Author: Milagros Nores, National Institute for Early Education Research; Non-Presenting Author: Allison Hope Friedman-Krauss, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; Non-Presenting Author: Alexandra Figueras-Daniel, Bank Street College of Education

• Measuring Preschool Classroom Quality: Can we Derive Comparable Scores Across Different Observation Tools? - Presenting Author: Yange Xue, Mathematica Policy Research - New Jersey; Non-Presenting Author: Sally Atkins-Burnett, Mathematica; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica Harding, Mathematica Policy Research - New Jersey

• Understanding Pre-K CLASS Estimates of Classroom Quality in Head Start Research - Presenting Author: Lizabeth Malone, Mathematica Policy Research - District of Columbia; Non-Presenting Author: Cassandra Baxter, Mathematica; Non-Presenting Author: Sally Atkins-Burnett, Mathematica