Child care quality--and strategies to
improve it--are topics that have moved to the top of the early
childhood policy agenda in Minnesota and the nation. Three trends
have fueled the interest in the quality of early care and education:
Across the early childhood education
field, professional development and workforce qualifications have
taken center stage as essential components of program quality that
should be targeted in quality improvement initiatives.
QUINCE is a cutting edge
evaluation of professional development strategies and their impact
on child care quality and preschool children's school readiness.
This national evaluation is funded by the
Child Care Bureau of
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and coordinated
by the Frank Porter Graham Child
Development Institute (FPG) at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.
Minnesota, California, Iowa, North
Carolina, and Nebraska are the five research sites included in the
evaluation. Child Trends has
partnered with CEED to conduct the evaluation in Minnesota. QUINCE
is testing the efficacy of a unique model of on-site
assessment-based consultation called Partnerships for Inclusion (PFI).
The evaluation compares PFI to the typical kinds of professional
development strategies available in the field, such as traditional
classroom-based training and peer mentoring.
PFI blends a relationship-based
approach and the environmental rating scales (Early
Childhood Environment Rating Scales [ECERS] and Family Day Care
Rating Scale [FDCRS]), which allows providers to learn the
standards for high-quality care and work collaboratively with a
consultant to assess their own environments, set goals for
improvements, and carry out an action plan. The ultimate goal of the
PFI consultation process is to equip providers with the skills and
tools to continually assess and improve the quality of their
program.
The PFI model has been shown to enhance
classroom quality significantly when delivered by highly trained
university-based consultants (Wesley, 1994) and also when delivered
by community-based child care consultants who were trained by the
PFI team (Palsha & Wesley, 1998). Both studies included
infant-toddler classrooms, and the second study (Palsha & Wesley,
1998) included a small number of family child care providers. QUINCE
will contribute findings that build on these foundational studies by
testing the PFI model outside of North Carolina and with a larger
sample of family child care homes.
References
Palsha, S., & Wesley, P.
(1998). Improving quality in early childhood environments through
on-site consultation. Topics in Early Childhood Special
Education, 18, 243-253.
Wesley, P. (1994). Providing
on-site consultation to promote quality in integrated child care
programs. Journal of Early Intervention, 18, 391-402.
