Guest EditorialIntroduction to ECRQ special issue measuring quality in early care and education: Past, present, and future
Section snippets
Background
At the turn of the 21st century, early childhood classroom quality measures were widely adopted for high-stakes purposes, including as part of state and federal policy monitoring systems (Coehn-Vogel et al., 2020; Merrill et al., 2020). Beginning in 2011, Head Start required programs scoring low on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) to recompete for continued funding (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2022). In 2016, the Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRIS) used by
Historical Trends in Early Childhood Classroom Quality Measurement
A first generation of assessments purporting to measure “quality” was published in the 1970s to 1990s, and a second generation in the 2000s. One of the first-generation measures, the ECERS, was based on a checklist and provided scoring rules for several dozen items and hundreds of indicators (Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, 2003, p. 9). A widely used second-generation measure, the CLASS, asked raters to assimilate and score what they saw in relation to narrative descriptions of
Solidifying Evidence About CLASS
Two articles discuss the CLASS measures and their use in high stakes assessment. Gordon and Peng (2020) examine whether evidence existed for the Head Start statutory criterion in two national Head Start surveys conducted shortly before (2009) and after (2014) the criterion went into effect. The authors' analyses of two Head Start Family and Child Experiences Surveys (FACES) cohorts found that associations of CLASS scores with children's academic and social-emotional gains during the Head Start
Are Behaviors in Classrooms Contextually Dependent?
A final set of articles examined the important question of whether the meaning of quality is contextually dependent. This question has always been fundamental to developmental science, and received renewed and heightened salience in the 21st century.
Where Do We Go From Here?
When we issued the call for papers for this special issue, our goal was to gather reports of research about the past, present, and future of measuring classroom interactions in early care and education. The resulting collection of articles demonstrate the rich traditions in developmental science of documenting interactions, materials, and resources in the settings where young children spend their time and how these aspects relate to children's learning and thriving. At the same time, the
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