Identifying Commonality in Observed Quality across Home- and Center-Based Early Learning Programs

• In Event: 1-107 - New Insights on Quality and Access in Early Care and Education: Lessons from QRIS Data

Integrative Statement

Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) increasingly include home- and center-based programs (Build & Child Trends, 2018). Identifying features of quality common to these different program types would help simplify communication with families, providers, and policy makers. Moreover, increasing equity in access to quality early learning programs requires addressing the various types of programs children attend. Access to center-based care varies by geography, and household characteristics such as race/ethnicity and income (National Survey of Early Care and Education, 2016). Home-based care is available in most communities in the US. Moreover, children often attend both home- and center-based programs, making the identification of some commonality in the quality of their experiences across various settings even more useful. The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta et al., 2008) has been used nearly exclusively in center-based programs, but is starting to be utilized in some home-based programs (Joseph et al., 2011; Lipscomb et al., 2016; Vitiello, 2014), such as in QRIS. Very little is known about measurement properties of the CLASS in home-based programs. Data collected through QRIS, and/or their validation studies, provide opportunity to examine whether common features of quality can be identified in home- and center-based programs, and those serving children of different ages. Findings will have great importance for understanding quality in early care and education.

Method and Results
This study involves re-analysis of data from a validation study of Oregon’s Quality Rating and Improvement System. Both home-based (n = 159) and center-based (n = 153) programs were assessed with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) PreK (Pianta et al., 2008), Toddler (LaParo et al., 2014), and a Combined version for mixed age-groups (Joseph et al., 2011). Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1. Exploratory factor analysis consistently revealed the same two factors of the CLASS across separate analyses for center- and home-based programs and age groups (Table 2). The first factor was named Emotional and Behavioral Support (EBS) because it includes the dimensions in the ESB factor of the toddler CLASS: Positive Climate, Negative Climate (reversed), Teacher Sensitivity, Regard for Student Perspectives, and Behavior Management. The second factor was also highly consistent across age groups and type of care. It included the remaining dimensions that are typically included in the Organized Classrooms, Instructional Support, and/or Engaged Support for Learning (toddler) domains (LaParo et al., 2014; Pianta et al., 2018). These are: Productivity, Instructional Learning Formats, Concept Development, Facilitation of Learning and Development (toddler), Language Modeling, and Quality of Feedback. Confirmatory factor analysis affirmed this structure, with configural invariance and partial metric invariance detected across type of care for both the toddler and the preK CLASS (results not shown due to space constraints). The combined CLASS did not have sufficient numbers of center-based programs to examine invariance. Ongoing analyses examine how structural indicators of quality relate to these two factors of the CLASS across home- and center-based care. Findings will have important implications for strategies to measure and improve quality in early care and education.

Authors

• Shannon Lipscomb, Oregon State University-Cascades
  Presenting Author

• Roberta Weber, Oregon State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Beth Green, Portland State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lindsey Patterson, Portland State University
  Non-Presenting Author