Examining the psychometric properties of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R)
Section snippets
Sample
ECERS-R data were collected from 326 classrooms in 202 Colorado child care centers over the period Fall 2000 to Summer 2002 by staff of the Center for Human Investment Policy (CHIP) at the University of Colorado, Denver. These providers were involved in a variety of child-care quality improvement efforts in Colorado and many had been assessed using the ECERS and ECERS-R in the past. Over the period in which data were collected CHIP employed a total of 41 ECERS-R data collectors. These
Descriptive statistics
Table 1, Table 2 present the descriptive statistics for the ECERS-R and the following regulatable measures of child-care quality used by Scarr et al. (1994): staff-to-child ratios, years of staff experience, number of post-secondary ECE credits, and level of educational attainment. Quality varied greatly within and across classrooms and providers. The average ECERS-R score for the entire sample was 5.153, which, using a classification system developed by Howes, Phillips, and Whitebook (1992),
Discussion
Our findings for the ECERS-R replicate Scarr et al.'s (1994) analyses of the original ECERS in most respects. We found that the ECERS-R does not assess seven distinct aspects of quality, but instead appears substantively to be a unidimensional quality indicator. One implication of this result is that shorter versions of the ECERS-R could serve as reliable indicators of quality. Indeed, regardless of whether subsets of items were chosen randomly, for ease-of-administration, or because they were
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the staff at the Center for Human Investment Policy (CHIP) at the University of Colorado, Denver for allowing us to use their child care center data.
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2018, Early Childhood Research QuarterlyCitation Excerpt :A number of studies, for example, have subjected the measure to factor analytic techniques to examine its dimensionality. Several studies have observed the ECERS-R to be unidimensional (Holloway, Kagan, Fuller, Tsou, & Carroll, 2001; Perlman, Zellman, & Le, 2004), or two dimensional consisting of factors that tap into the physical environment/materials and teacher interactions (Cassidy et al., 2005; Sakai, Whitebook, Wishards, & Howes, 2003), but no studies have found evidence of the seven scales described in the ECERS-R. Using item response theory, Gordon et al. (2013) also demonstrated evidence of individual item multidimensionality, resulting in rating category disorder on 32 of the 36 items they examined.