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Child Care
How Is Child Care Quality Measured 2
Last Updated Oct 5, 2008 02:25 PM
Another commonly used process measure is the Caregiver Interaction Scale (Arnett, 1989) that rates teachers’ sensitivity during interactions with children. This 26-item measure yields three scores (sensitivity—warm, attentive, engaged; harshness—critical, punitive; detachment—low levels of interaction, interest, or supervision) which are combined to create an overall caregiver quality score. The ratings are made after two 45-minute observations conducted on two separate occasions by two separate observers.
The Assessment Profile (Abbott-Shim & Sibley, 1992a, 1992b) assesses different aspects of quality, namely features related to health and safety, physical facilities, and individualized child services. Different forms of the instrument are available for child care homes and centers. These forms list individual items that are viewed as exemplars of (a) healthy, safe settings, (b) rich physical environments, and (c) settings that meet the needs of adult staff. Individual items are scored using a yes/no format, with “yes” designating items that were either observed or reported by staff. These items can be scored reliably (see NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1996). Caregivers have been observed to offer more positive caregiving in settings that receive higher Profile scores (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1996, in press-a).
The CC-HOME Inventory is a measure of process quality that uses a checklist approach to create a quality score across multiple domains, including the health and safety of the physical environment, variety of experiences, and materials (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1996). Derived from Bradley and Caldwell’s well-known assessment of the quality of the home environment, 45 items are scored on a yes/no basis and then summed (alpha = .81). In one study, children who attended better-quality child care homes as measured by the CC-HOME Inventory obtained higher Bayley scores at 24 months and higher school readiness and language comprehension scores at 36 months, in comparison to children who attended poorer-quality child care homes (Clarke-Stewart, Vandell, Burchinal, O’Brien, and McCartney, 2000).
Other measures have been less successful in providing reliable and valid assessments of process quality. For example, Lamb and colleagues failed to find concurrent associations between child care quality and child functioning in their study of child care in Sweden (Broberg, Hwang, Lamb, and Bookstein, 1990). One factor that likely contributed to the lack of significant relations was problems with their quality measure. The Belsky-Walker Checklist (Broberg et al., 1990) asks observers to check off if 13 positive events (e.g., caregiver provided verbal elaboration, caregiver gives heightened emotional display; signs of positive regard ) and 7 negative events (e.g., child cries; child aimless; caregivers in non-child conversations) occur at least once during 3-minute observation intervals. This 3-minute time observation frame was substantially longer than the 10- to 30-second intervals recommended for recording social interactions (Yarrow and Zahn-Waxler, 1979). Consequently, the checklist may have failed to detect meaningful distinctions in caregiver behavior because the time interval was too long to detect meaningful differences. This checklist underscores the challenge of designing and assessing process quality. Detecting relations between process quality and child outcomes requires robust measures.
Structural and Caregiver Characteristics
A second approach to describing child care quality is in terms of their structural and caregiver characteristics. Characteristics such as child:adult ratio, group class size, caregiver formal education, and caregiver specialized training are viewed as more distal contributors to quality environments. Structural and caregiver characteristics are the only quality indicators obtained in survey studies such as the National Child Care Survey (Hofferth, Brayfield, Deich, and Holcomb, 1991), the National Household Education Survey (Hofferth et al., 1998), and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (Blau, 1999-c). Structural and caregiver characteristics have been collected in addition to process-oriented measures in studies such as the Cost, Quality and Outcome Study, thereby permitting relations between these characteristics and process quality to be evaluated. See also Child Care 625 1 - 4 |
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Childcare and healthy eating
Some children can spend long periods of time in childcare. That means they eat a lot of their meals and snacks away from parental supervision. It's important that children in care eat nutritious meals and are educated about healthy food and diet. Research has shown that some children in care may not get enough of some important dietary nutrients.
Childcare centres and carers should be familiar with hygiene and nutrition stan... Although much of the research literature has reported significant relations between structural and caregiver characteristics, and process quality, Blau (in press) has cautioned that these associations may be the result of uncontrolled factors that are confounded with the structural and caregiver characteristics.
He argues that these confounding factors might include center policies, curriculum, and directors’ leadership skills. To address this p... Every May, the provincial government — along with child care providers around the province — acknowledges Child Care Month. It is a time to recognize the importance of child care to families, and the exceptional work of child care givers in communities around our province. Everyone has a role to play in delivering child care.
Each day, parents make child care choices for their families, and contribute to decision making with their providers. Children interact in healthy, nurturing environments. Caregivers receive training in early childhood education, and carry out exceptional work to provide this valuable service.
Th... Assessment of the Cost of Improving Quality
As we suggested, analyses that shed light on the developmental benefits of child care characteristics for children is an important element of the answer to our question. A related task involves determining the levels of investment necessary to achieve improved quality. Although this topic has not received the same level of attention in the literature as the overall relationship between quality of care and child outcomes, several studies consider the financial costs of increasing structural measures of qua... Does It Matter and Does It Need to be Improved?
Child care has become the norm for young children in the United States. In 1995, 59 percent of children who were 5 years or younger were in nonparental care arrangements on a regular basis (Hofferth, Shauman, Henke, and West, 1998). This care typically began at early ages and lasted substantial hours: with 44 percent of infants under the age of 1 year were in nonparental care for an average of 31 hours a week. In the late preschool years, 84 percent of 4- to 5-year-olds were reco... Associations between structural quality in the first 3 years and children’s later preschool and kindergarten adjustment were tested, controlling for a family socialization composite and a family demographic composite.
Children with a history of poor-quality child care during the first 3 years were rated by their preschool teachers as being more difficult and by their kindergarten teachers as being more hostile. The ch... WHAT IS THE QUALITY OF CARE IN THE UNITED STATES?
The evidence reviewed above indicates that child care quality has meaningful effects on children and their parents. Our next question considers the quality of the care that is available in the United States. One part of this question is a determination of whether high-quality care (of the sort that fosters positive developmental outcomes) is the norm or the exception. The fli... Other efforts to improve quality might be to mandate certain minimum requirements. These can take the form of reducing child:adult ratios, reducing group sizes, establishing and enforcing safety regulations, and education and training. An example of such regulations is a model standard that applies to small family home caregivers. The National Health and Safety Performance Standard (American Public Health Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, 1992) states that one small family caregiver who does not have an assistant â??shall not care for more than six children, including no more than two children under... |
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