Special Focus: Pathways to Child Care QualityPredicting process quality from structural quality in preschool programs: a cross-country comparison
Section snippets
Participants
Countries included in this study are Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the United States. (A description of the early childhood systems in each of these countries can be found in Tietze et al., 1996). Centers were selected within each country to represent both national diversity, such as full-day/part-day or profit/non-profit, and the range of variables that may be related to quality of programs, such as rural or urban locations, or culturally or politically different traditions. Sampling
Do the structural features of classrooms, centers, and regions in Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the United States differ?
The structural and process quality features found in the different countries provide a picture of how the various ECE systems are organized and implemented. To see similarities and differences between the ECE systems, separate multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) examined the selected measures of classroom process quality, classroom structural characteristics, and center structural characteristics that differed systematically among the four countries (see Table 1). ANOVAs for each of the
Process quality in the four countries is relatively similar, but the structures that are used to create it differ significantly
Although the four countries included in this study are all western industrialized countries, each has established an independent system for the care and education of preschool-aged children. The results of the MANOVA allow us to see how structural quality measures compare across these countries. Results were generally not unexpected, but there was also no clear pattern found in any one country in which all measures of structural quality are consistently higher than in any other country.
The
Summary
We did not find any one consistently powerful predictor of process quality in the four countries, and there was no single level of variables that had an overwhelming influence on process quality. In other words, the predictive power of the model is based on many variables acting together. Thus, in planning for ECE process quality improvements, it is likely that many structural characteristics will need to be considered simultaneously, with an understanding of how each structural characteristic
Note
In this article the work reported for the European countries was part of a larger project, the European Child Care and Education Study (ECCE). The project was funded nationally by various sources. Participating universities in this project were the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany (Wolfgang Tietze, Principal Investigator and ECCE Study Coordinator), the Universität Salzburg, Austria (Volker Krumm, Principal Investigator), the Universidade do Porto, Portugal (Joaquim Bairrão, Principal
References (33)
Caregivers in day-care centersDoes training matter?
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
(1989)- et al.
Family and classroom correlates of Head Start children’s developmental outcomes
Early Childhood Research Quarterly
(1994) - et al.
The prediction of process quality from structural features of child care
Early Childhood Research Quarterly
(1997) - et al.
Measurement of quality in child care centers
Early Childhood Research Quarterly
(1994) - et al.
Comparisons of observed quality in early child care and education programs in five countries
Early Childhood Research Quarterly
(1996) Relationship of caregiver training to child-oriented attitudes, job satisfaction, and behaviors towards children
Child Care Quarterly
(1985)- Biemiller, A., Avis, C., & Lindsay, A. (1976). Competence supporting aspects of day care environments. Paper presented...
The ecology of human developmentExperiments by nature and design
(1979)- et al.
Center structure
Cost, quality and child outcomes in child care centersPublic report
(1995)