Stability and patterns of classroom quality in German early childhood education and care

ABSTRACT

Many education systems worldwide have dedicated a significant amount of resources to improve quality levels in early childhood education and care. Research can contribute to this goal by providing information about conditions of high-quality education and care and reasons for changes in the quality provided to children. This study therefore analyzes the stability of educational quality and patterns of dependency of process quality on possibly determining context factors over a period of 3 consecutive school years to detect mechanisms of change and patterns of quality. Longitudinal data of a field study with annual assessments in 97 German classrooms were analyzed via growth curve analyses using Bayesian estimation. The analyses revealed an increase in process quality provided in the classrooms. Classroom composition characteristics showed strongest relations to status and change of process quality; allocated resources and characteristics of the professional staff were less strongly related.

KEYWORDS:

• Early child care settings
• classroom quality
• longitudinal study
• stability

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participating children, their parents, and setting staff members, as well as all student research assistants involved in data collection for their most active support. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. We thank Christiane Grosse for her collaboration in preparing a previous version of the manuscript.

Notes

1. In addition, all analyses were repeated with theoretically derived domain-specific subscales on “promotion in literacy” and “promotion in numeracy” (Kuger & Kluczniok, 2008). These subscales were created across ECERS-R and ECERS-E. Respective items primarily assess interactions between teachers and children and are thus less dependent on the material surrounding in the setting than the overall ECERS scores may be. Results for these subscales mirror those that are reported for the total scores in this manuscript and can be requested from the first author.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the German Research Foundation [grant number RO 820/11]; the third author was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education to The University of Wisconsin-Madison [grant number R305D110001].

Notes on contributors

Susanne Kuger

Susanne Kuger is a senior researcher at the German Institute for International Educational Research, Department of Educational Quality and Evaluation. She is a member of the international PISA consortium and responsible for the development and evaluation of context assessment in PISA 2015. Her research interests are educational effectiveness in institutional learning settings, international educational research, teaching and learning research, giftedness, and early childhood education

Katharina Kluczniok

Katharina Kluczniok is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Chair for Early Childhood Education, University of Bamberg. Her research interests are the impact of educational quality in preschool settings and families on children’s cognitive and socioemotional development as well as the transition from preschool to primary school.

David Kaplan

David Kaplan is Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin. His research focuses on the development of Bayesian methods applied to a wide range of education research settings and the applications of advanced quantitative methodologies to substantive and methodological problems in Large-Scale Assessments, and international school effectiveness and educational policy research.

Hans-Guenther Rossbach

Hans-Guenther Rossbach holds the Chair of Early Childhood Education at the University of Bamberg and is director of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories. His main research interests are longitudinal effects of quality of stimulation in family, preschool, and elementary school on early childhood competence development as well as the development of curricula for preschools.