Capital Area Early Childhood Training Institute
Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development
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Governor's Task Force on Early Care and Education Quality Assessment Study
This large scale quality assessment study focuses on Pennsylvania's early childhood programs, including Head Start, child care, family child care, preschool and legally unregulated child care. A sample of 400 programs are being randomly drawn throughout the Commonwealth to represent child care providers.
Debby Cryer, noted early child care expert and author of the ECERS-R (Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale - Revised) and FDCRS (Family Day Care Rating Scale) provided on-site reliability testing on these tools, as well as the Arnett Caregiver Interaction Scale with four data collectors who served as anchors for the other evaluators. This core group then served as group leaders for the remaining data collectors. A total of 4 weeks of extensive training was provided for this pool of 20 data collectors. All staff achieved a minimum of 85% reliability (the acceptable industry standard). Data collectors were chosen based on their extensive experience and expertise in the early childhood field.
Process coordination of this study is conducted by Barbara Carl at the Harrisburg Center for Healthy Child Development. University of Pittsburgh makes the initial contact with the randomly selected child care provider. This notification is then forwarded to staff at the Center who, in turn, collect the signed caregiver informed consent forms and assign data collectors. Completed data is then logged in and processed for analysis.