A Guide to Analyzing and Interpreting ECERS-3 Data

This title is in the Environment Rating Scale ® Family of Products. Early childhood is a crucial stage in a child’s life, and aspects of the environment in the physical, social-emotional, cognitive, and health and safety domains all play important roles in shaping children’s development during these early years. Having a valid and reliable measure of the quality of these aspects of children’s care settings is critical. The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale® (ECERS-3) is the leading research-based instrument for examining these influential global factors that directly impact children in early childhood environments. In this new guide, readers will find an in-depth description of both the conceptual model underlying the ECERS-3 and innovative ways of analyzing data for a fuller understanding of what can be done with the scale and why it is integral to the evaluation of early care and education. The authors analyze a large database of classroom observations to help ECERS-3 users better understand, interpret, and utilize their own findings. Readers will also see how components of their ECERS-3 data relate to one another, within and across subscales, and within the scale as a whole. A Guide to Analyzing and Interpreting ECERS-3 Data will assist program directors, agency administrators, preK–K teaching coaches/mentors, school principals, researchers, and others who use the ECERS-3 to more successfully document, interpret, and analyze the quality of essential influential factors in an early learning setting. This resource will help guide program improvement initiatives with insight into what is needed for children’s development and learning. Book Features: Provides a framework for thinking about how early childhood care and education learning environments fit into the larger picture of influences on children’s development. Presents a theory of change that combines understanding how children learn and develop with how early education and care affect long-term outcomes. Analyzes what ECERS-3 data looks like for a large sample of classrooms and by different child and teacher characteristics. Includes full color tables and figures illuminating the data analysis of the classroom observations.

Table of Contents:
Contents Foreword Debi Mathias v Acknowledgments ix 1. Introduction 1 Purpose of the Guide 2 Early Childhood Learning Environments: A Conceptual Framework 2 Views of How Children Learn and Develop 4 Theory of Change 6 Assessing Quality 9 2. ECERS-3 Background 11 Early Work in Assessing Learning Environments 11 ECERS Revisions Process 13 Administration 16 Overview of the Subscales 16 Comparability 18 Validity and Reliability of Previous Versions 22 3. Summarizing ECERS-3 Data Descriptively 24 Sample 24 Statistical Methods 24 Describing Items 27 Describing Subscales 32 Other Summary Scores 36 4. Describing Statistical Relationships 40 Differences Between Groups or Conditions 40 Summary 44 5. Examining Predictors of Quality: Structural Equations Modeling 45 Head Start 45 Methods 46 Associations Among Quality and Three Features of Classrooms 47 Applications and Implications 50 6. Examining Predictors of Quality: Hierarchical Linear Models 52 Model 1: Unconditional Model 52 Model 2: Random-Intercept Model 53 Sensitivity Analysis Using LASSO 56 7. Examining Groups With Shared Characteristics 61 8. Special Issues 64 Use in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems and Other High-Stakes Applications 64 Race, Ethnicity, and Equity 67 Serving Children With Disabilities 68 National Norms 69 International Uses 71 Safe and Healthy Environments 72 9. Future Work 73 Exploring Alternative Structures in the ECERS-3 73 Ensuring Adequate Consideration of Equity and Diversity in Early Childhood Environments 74 Focusing on Specific Features of Programming: Extensions of the ECERS-3 75 Expanding International Use 76 Measuring Associations With Children’s Outcomes 76 10. Conclusions 77 Appendix: Supplementary Analyses 81 Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition 81 Item Response Theory: Rasch Model Without Covariates 83 Differential Item Functioning 85 Bibliography 89 Index 107 About the Authors 117