Assessing Quality of ECD Environments As a Reliable Predictor of School Readiness SUCCEED Program: Early Learning for School Success Program Like many developing countries, Bangladesh has made dramatic improvements in primary school enrollment (80%) but less impressive gains in retention and learning. The problem remains that 40% of first graders dropout before completing second grade and 40% of those who stay repeat second grade. Most critically, progress in enrollment has not been matched by improvement in quality education. The overall primary school attendance rate of students has not exceeded 60% and less than 1.6 percent of primary cycle completers achieved all the cognitive competencies prescribed by the national curriculum. Further, taking into account the net enrollment and completion rate, it can be said that over 40% of the eligible children do not complete the five year cycle of primary education. The multi-donor Primary Education Development Program (PEDP II) in Bangladesh envisages a number of quality improvements over six years (2004-2010) to address these problems. PEDP II intends to: reduce student-teacher ratio, increase contact hours, develop quality standards, build additional classrooms, hire additional teachers, and introduce systemic management reforms. To improve teaching-learning processes and institutional capacity, PEDP II will provide in-service education for 1.5 million primary teachers and half a million non-teaching participants, using institutions, mechanisms and approaches currently in place. USAID Bangladesh will contribute to improvements in the sector by focusing on the conditions and opportunities necessary to prepare children to be successful learners at school. USAID finances two innovative early childhood education initiatives designed to improve school readiness. The first is Sisimpur, a Bangladeshi version of Sesame Street, the world-renowned children’s television program. This project is being implemented by Sesame Workshop. The second activity is Project SUCCEED, developed and implemented by Save the Children US/Bangladesh. Project SUCCEED (2004-2009) aims to provide the scientific analysis and research, training and programmatic support needed for designing and implementing effective early childhood education programs that ensure primary school readiness. The SUCCEED model incorporates preschools and parenting to support development of five year olds; primary school and community based activities that sustain and enrich learning for 6-8 year olds; and capacity development at the community and national levels to support early learning and spread the innovative methods and materials. Through this work, SUCCEED intends to clarify the child and educational inputs that are necessary for school achievement and the kind of early childhood care and education required to support children’s overall development in the early childhood years SUCCEED recognizes that children’s readiness to attend primary school is shaped by numerous factors and that any effort to improve this readiness must address the child’s
development of skills and behaviors, the parents’ understanding of child development and the demands of schooling, and the environments in which children spend their time. SUCCEED is designed to ensure that its model of early childhood development is relevant to children's needs, cultural context, and globally accepted “best practices”. In planning the preschool component the staff wondered, “How can we determine whether children who have attended preschool for the year will surpass children who have not in their intellectual, social, and physical development?” “Will SUCCEED preschool graduates continue to do well in subsequent school years?” The question of measuring the child’s school readiness is a point of wide discussion in the ECD field. One trend in thinking supports assessing the preschool’s readiness to meet the needs of young children in relevant and appropriate ways versus assessing child readiness through a test. Assessing individual preschool children is difficult and expensive and it is not easy to obtain reliable and valid measures. Maintaining early childhood environments that offer a level of quality associated with successful outcomes in school and life is an alternative strategy to assure school readiness. SUCCEED staff were convinced that the latter option offered greater cost benefits. While Save the Children has implemented early childhood programs in Bangladesh since 1999, the model has not been systematically evaluated. The Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS) was selected for the purpose. The ECERS is the acknowledged international measure of preschool quality and has been used in national surveys in North America, Europe, India, and Israel. The ECERS can be used by a teacher for self-assessment or by an outside observer for program monitoring, program evaluation, and research. ECERS levels of quality are based on standards established by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The focus is on identifying the educational needs of children and developing a strategy to best meet those needs. Globally, significant comparative relationships exist between ECERS scores and child outcome measures, teacher characteristics, and teacher behavior. The basic scale remains the same in translations, but some indicators do require adaptation to make them culturally relevant. The ECERS was piloted in Bangladesh and found to be correlated with the cognitive and language performance of schoolchildren; that is, children in lower quality preschools did worse on tests of verbal and nonverbal reasoning than children in higher quality (even if not very high) preschools. Inter-rater reliabilities were quite high for all subscales. Overall ECERS scores correlated significantly with cognitive measures of participating children, thus providing assurance of its validity in Bangladesh. The results were then applied to recommendations for improving child cognitive and social outcomes by improving the quality of preschool materials and activities. Dr. Frances Aboud, McGill University, may be contacted (frances.aboud@staff.mcgill.ca) for more information about this study. Using the ECERS, SUCCEED intends to identify and monitor levels of preschool quality that positively correlate with achievement outcome. On the seven ECERS subscales this translates to a score of 5, given the range of 1 to 7. Certain subscales, such as space and
furnishings, will not be given a priority. SUCCEED hopes to find that even if scores are low due to a shortage of space, these are not the critical elements of a program. Rather the Activities and Program subscales, along with Language and Interaction will be prioritized for evaluation and action. Changes specified in the ECERS are easy to make because they are clear and targeted; experiences have shown that the changes have a very large impact on the overall quality. Where subscale scores are low, targeted efforts will be placed. For example, teachers who talk with students about logical relationships while they are playing and encourage children to explain their reasoning when solving problems receive a score of 5. Teachers who guide children with questions that require reasoning during group meetings, but not free play receive a 3. Teachers who do not talk with children about logical relationships receive a score of 1. The eventual goal should be to reach scores of 5 on critical items. In February 2005, SUCCEED procured technical assistance to design the ECERS preschool quality study for 1800 preschools. A statistically reliable sample of preschools will be evaluated annually, five months into the school year. Sample size estimation for a representative sample of preschools is 36. Thus, six preschools will be randomly selected from each of six project impact areas. The intention is take a careful look at the curriculum, materials, instructional methods, and interpersonal communications. All of these qualities are important if children are to benefit from their mornings in a preschool. There is no point in educating teachers to implement a program that lacks essential ingredients, and no point in having a teacher implement a good program in a harsh manner. The ECERS considers all of these qualities. The study will be conducted by external examiners; however, all SUCCEED early childhood technical officers, monitoring and research specialists and preschool teachers will be taught to use the instrument for program monitoring, learning, and improvement. The purpose of the classroom environmental assessment is geared to not only assess investment impact, but to also guide teachers and staff. By participating in the assessments, it is hoped that the teachers will internalize the method of child observation as a means for assessing individual student development needs, and in turn will respond to those needs. In this way, the evaluation components of SUCCEED inform practice and ongoing program improvements to assure school readiness for every child. For more information, please contact Lala Borja at Delilah@savechildren.org or Mary Hobbs, Education Team Leader, USAID/Bangladesh mhobbs@usaid.gov. Bangladesh Field Office Save the Children Federation, Inc. May 2005