ERIC Number: ED620286
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2022-May
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Widely Used Measures of Pre-K Classroom Quality: What We Know, Gaps in the Field, and Promising New Directions. Measures for Early Success
Weiland, Christina; Rosada, Paola Guerrero
MDRC
High-quality pre-K sets children on a path for success in kindergarten and beyond. Yet most children in the United States do not attend high-quality programs, with particularly pronounced gaps in quality for children from families with low incomes, dual language learners, Black children, and Latino children. Ensuring equitable access to high-quality pre-K requires being able to measure quality, particularly at a large scale. Accurate, reliable, and timely measurement of pre-K quality can help parents make better choices when they have multiple early learning options, and can help policymakers, school administrators, and educators improve the quality of early education settings. At its core, early childhood measurement is an equity issue. Although there are many available measures of the learning experiences of children in pre-K, only a few have been widely used. As reviewed in this brief, these commonly used measures have many strengths, such as facilitating cross-system comparisons of quality and identifying areas for teachers' growth. However, existing widely used measures tend to be weak predictors of gains in children's skills in pre-K, overlook individual learning experiences, pay limited attention to cultural responsiveness, and typically do not measure the content of children's learning. Policymakers, program administrators, and teachers can only respond to what is measured. Because of these shortcomings, when used in isolation, these measures may unintentionally hold back progress critical to closing gaps in early learning quality, equity, and opportunity. These limitations have led experts to call for a new generation of quality measurement work in early childhood. Some of this work has already begun. This brief describes the existing landscape of widely used measures of pre-K quality, further spotlights some of the newer measurement work, and concludes with a discussion of future directions for the field. Investing now to strengthen measures of pre-K quality is critical to building equitable early learning opportunities for children from historically marginalized groups.
Descriptors: Educational Quality, Low Income, English (Second Language), Minority Group Students, Access to Education, Equal Education, Educational Improvement, Outcome Measures, Learning Experience, Cultural Awareness, Culturally Relevant Education, Evaluation Methods, Rating Scales, Classroom Environment, Inclusion, Early Childhood Education, Preschools
MDRC. 16 East 34th Street 19th Floor, New York, NY 10016-4326. Tel: 212-532-3200; Fax: 212-684-0832; e-mail: publications@mdrc.org; Web site: http://www.mdrc.org
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Preschool Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Institute of Education Sciences (ED)
Authoring Institution: MDRC
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale; Classroom Assessment Scoring System
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305N160018
Author Affiliations: N/A