TY - JOUR PY - 1994// TI - Measurement of quality in child care centers JO - Early childhood research quarterly A1 - Scarr, Sandra A1 - Eisenberg, Marlene A1 - Deater-Deckard, Kirby SP - 131 EP - 151 VL - 9 IS - 2 N2 - Assessment of quality of care in 363 classrooms with infants, toddlers, and preschool children was conducted in 120 child care centers in three states with widely varying regulations. Three major process measures, InfantToddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS; Harms, Cryer & Clifford, 1987), Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS; Harms & Clifford, 1980), and the Assessment Profile for Early Childhood Programs (Abbott-Shim & Sibley, 1987) were included. Regulatable aspects of quality of child care included ratio of caregivers to children, group size, teacher training in child development or child care, teacher education, highest wage paid to a teacher in the center, and staff turnover. The goal of the study was to evaluate how well the quality of child care is measured by process and regulatable variables. For research purposes, the process measures proved to be highly redundant, both internally and with each other. Much smaller sets of items, drawn randomly from the instruments' item pools, were found to be perfectly acceptable measures of quality of care. Regulatable measures did not prove to be acceptable measures of quality care, except for teachers' wages, which were highly correlated with process measures of quality.

LA - SN - 0885-2006 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0885-2006(94)90002-7 ID - ref1 ER -