To meet recent accountability mandates, school districts are implementing assessment frameworks to document teachers' effectiveness. Observational assessments play a key role in this process, albeit without compelling evidence of their psychometric rigor. Using a sample of kindergarten teachers, we employed Generalizability theory to investigate…

Numerous studies have highlighted the important role played by school principals in improving the learning of their students, especially those at risk of social exclusion. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the pedagogical leadership exercised by the principals of disadvantaged schools in the Community of Madrid (Spain). To this end,…

Classroom observations are increasingly common in education policies as a means to assess the quality of teachers and/or education programs for purposes of making high-stakes decisions. This article considers one policy, the Head Start Designation Renewal System (DRS), which involves classroom observations to assess the quality of Head Start…

Leaders, policymakers, and systems developers seek to improve early childhood programs through data driven decision-making. Data can be useful for informing continuous quality improvement efforts at the classroom and program level and for creating support for workforce development at the system level. Early childhood program leaders use…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between staff size and perceived organizational support (POS) in early childhood education (ECE) organizations. Design/methodology/approach: A territory-wide questionnaire survey was designed to investigate the perceptions of preschool teachers in Hong Kong on four dimensions of…

This pre- and posttest multiple-case study examined the effectiveness and usability of the Sensory Processing Measure-Preschool Quick Tips (SPM-P QT) by key stakeholders (parents and teachers) for implementing data-driven intervention to address sensory processing challenges. The Sensory Processing Measure-Preschool (SPM-P) was administered as an…

Early childhood teachers routinely face insufficient teaching supports and inadequate rewards for their education and commitment (e.g., low pay, lack of professional supports, and lack of benefits). These shortcomings contribute to poor program quality and fuel high levels of teacher turnover, preventing program improvement and making it…

This research was conducted to evaluate the technical properties of a set of early numeracy CBM tests that were designed to operationalize early numeric concepts. Data were collected over the course of a school year from 113 kindergarten and first-grade children using nine separate tests with three alternative forms. In addition, test-retest…

The purpose of this study is to describe what data preschools in a mid-sized city in the Northeast collect, how they use that data, and the challenges they face. The study focuses on three types of data: early learning outcomes, dosage (i.e., the amount of exposure to early childhood education), and classroom quality. The report further…

This "Stated Briefly" report is a companion piece that summarizes the results of another report of the same name. This study explores how seven early childhood education programs in a mid-sized city in the Northeast region are collecting and using data, how they would like to use data, how they could use the data that they have, and the…