Quality of the Literacy Environment in Day Care and Children's Development

Abstract

Although traditional assessments of day care environments have been linked to children's development, understanding of the specific characteristics of the environment that enhance language, literacy, and cognitive development is sketchy. The purpose of this study was to explore the lenvironment for iteracy in day care centers, its relationship with traditional measures of day care quality and its influence on children's cognitive and language development. Observation of the environments in the 30 community-based day care classrooms sampled revealed relatively impoverished environments. Correlation and multiple regression analyses indicated that settings of higher day care quality also had higher quality environments. In separate hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for variance due to family factors, both day care quality and the environment predicted a significant portion of the variance in children's language development but not in children's cognitive development.