Poster #22 - Association Between Child Care Training for Early Caregivers and Children’s Elementary School Test Scores

• In Event: Poster Session 11

Abstract

One of the primary goals for preschool teacher/early childhood care giver professional training is to improve the quality of care and education provided to children served. The importance of this training is reflected in the number of state policies requiring such training. For example, in the state of Missouri, early childhood teachers and caregivers are required to take the equivalent of 12 hours of training per year. The impact of these trainings has been noted as having a positive influence of child outcome, particularly in small, experimental studies in which there is high fidelity to training practices (e.g., Walk et al., 2018). It is less clear how impactful general trainings are on child outcome and particularly long-term child outcome.

The primary goal of the current secondary data analysis is to explore the associations between general early caregiver training on the long-term performance of children during elementary school. In order to address this goal, we have extracted data from the Missouri training data system and from the Missouri Assessment Program Data system. The first data system contains a variety of information about the trainings early care givers take and characteristics of those trainings, the providers and children they serve, and background information about caregivers and providers. The second data system provides aggregated data for how children at schools perform on achievement tests during school. For this proposal, we are exploring the associations at the county-level. There are 114 counties in Missouri and the aggregated data at this level was readily available and shows good variance.

Currently, we have datasets from both systems and are working to join them together. The training data will be extracted from previous years to match the appropriate time frame for the elementary outcome data. We will also focus on changes in training type and amount for several years prior to this time in order to determine how change in training practices relates to later elementary outcome. When joined, we will begin by exploring the covariance between early trainings and later elementary outcome. We will also explore various factors to determine the need for control variables and moderating variables. We anticipate that changes in early training will result in improvement in later outcome. We will provide discussion and implications of the findings and tie them to theory and practice.

Authors

• Louis Manfra, University of Missouri - Columbia
  Presenting Author

• Francisco Palermo, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Rachel Thibodeau-Nielsen, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Aida Ismailova

• Christine Cord, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Prabhath W K Pallewaththa Palle Waththage, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Shannon E Dier, University of Missouri - Columbia