Variations in Chinese parental perceptions of early childhood education quality

ABSTRACT

As consumers of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), Chinese parents play a crucial role in the ongoing process of monitoring, evaluating, and improving the quality of ECEC in China. This study used questionnaires to solicit parental feedback on the importance of, and their quality ratings for, aspects of ECEC. The researchers used a random and stratified sampling procedure and selected 794 parents from 91 kindergartens representing ECEC services at all levels, funding sources, and locations to participate in the survey research. Results revealed that Chinese parents rated each quality dimension of high importance. Compared with trained observers’ ratings, parents gave their children’s ECEC programmes significantly higher quality ratings on every subscale. The differences between professional and parental ratings were smaller in items related to aspects that were easier to observe/monitor (e.g. space and furnishings) than in items that were more difficult to observe/monitor (e.g. guidance and interaction; language reasoning). Also, parental income and level of education influenced how parents perceived the quality of the ECEC programme that their child attended.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood care
• parental perception
• educational market
• education quality
• ECERS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yisu Zhou http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9246-9700

Notes

1. Though we asked for the same background information about the mother of the child as well, the response rate for these variables was much lower. We examined the correlation between the father’s and the mother’s education level and income and found high positive correlation for non-missing observations. Therefore we decided to use the father’s background characteristics in our model.

2. In our survey, ‘migrant workers’ refers to rural residents who migrate to urban areas seeking work opportunities. They comprise a large part of the current Chinese population. It is estimated that their population was more than 100 million in 2006 (Shi 2008).

3. We link the parental questionnaire and raters’ rating score. The resulting sample is reduced to 675 because of missing values.

4. Since we have only two raters per classroom to rate ECEC based on CECERS and there are multiple parents within each classroom, Goodman and Kruskal’s gamma’s assumption of independence may be violated. We also did a similar analysis to aggregate parental ratings at the classroom level and then correlated these with the raters’ ratings using Spearman’s rank correlation. The results are qualitatively similar.

5. An estimate suggests that 17%–19% of the population engages in agriculture (Zhang and Wang 2011).

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this manuscript is supported in part by the following grants: A Multidimensional and Integrated View Approach to Chinese Preschool Evaluation from the National Social Science Foundation for Young Scholars of China (Grant # CHA110131); A Policy Study for Including Kindergarten Year Compulsory Education in Mainland China funded as the Key Grant Project of the Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (Grant # AHA090006); University of Macau (SRG005-FED13-ZYS).