Abstract

The early experiences in the first few years of life “wires” the development for later years. The synaptic connections that occur in early years are influenced by the quality of experiences a child has. One of the important sources that influence early experiences is early childhood care and education centers. This is even more true in today’s context where more and more mothers are seeking gainful employment outside the home and the onus for caring and education the child is left to external agencies such as creches, daycares centers and early learning centers. While some of these external agencies offer quality care, the care offered by others is questionable. Research indicates that richer the environment in terms of adult initiated experiences, play, parental involvement, activity / program etc, greater the neural network interconnections will be, leading to better learning and retention. Quality in an early care and learning center is dependent on various factors such as space, furnishing, health / safety practices, staff and program schedules among other parameters. Today there is a felt need for an assessment tool that parents can use to identify an appropriate centers for their child to go to; the centers need a tool to carry out a SWOC analysis of their center and the concerned authorities need a tool to assess centers and allocate appropriate funding. Therefore, the present research focused on the development of an assessment tool to help assess early learning centers. The developed tool, called the “Early care and learning center rating scale (ECLCRS)”, is a multidimensional scale that measures the essential features of quality in an early care and learning center. It is a scale which is easy to administer, score and analyze the results. ECLCRS consists of 2 parts. The first part gathers comprehensive information about the basic details of the early learning center. The second part of the ECLCRS consists of 164 items that are distributed across 11 components, namely policies and procedures, physical infrastructure, staff profiling, health and safety practices, activity / program schedules, adult initiated experiences, play, record maintenance, child assessments, parental involvement and community involvement. The developed Early Care and Learning Center Rating Scale use a 7 point Likert style format in which the observer is required to rate the early care and learning center based on the observations made. The observation scoring ranges from 0 to 6 - 0 being “absent”, 1 “inadequate”, 2 minimal, 3 “satisfactory”, 4 “good”, 5 “very good” and 6 “excellent”. Score 1 falls in between “absent” and “minimal”, score 3 in between “minimal” and “good”; score 5 in between “good” and “excellent”. For certain items, symbols have been added as indicators to describe or explain the item to facilitate accurate observation. A detailed manual has also been developed to help in understanding the tool, its administration, scoring and interpretation of scores.

Authors and Affiliations