Early childhood is a crucial stage in a child’s life, and aspects of the environment in the physical, social-emotional, cognitive, and health and safety domains all play important roles in shaping children's development. Having a reliable measure of the quality of these aspects of children’s early learning settings is critical. The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale®, Third Edition, (ECERS-3) is a leading research-based instrument for examining these influential global factors that directly impact children in preK–K classrooms.
In this
free webinar for preK-K administrators, program directors, school principals, coaches, researchers, state QIS personnel, and others who use the ECERS-3, authors Richard M. Clifford, Noreen Yazejian, Wonkyung Jang, and Dari Jigjidsuren will describe how to get the most out of your ECERS-3 findings. Their new book,
A Guide to Analyzing and Interpreting ECERS-3 Data, provides the conceptual model underlying the ECERS-3 and ways of analyzing data for a fuller understanding of the scale and why it is integral to the evaluation of early care and education.
The session will begin with a brief overview of the principles used in developing the ECERS—what is meant by “environment,” views of how children learn, and the development of the ERS instruments—followed by a review of what the ECERS-3 looks like, the process for scoring it, and the breadth of the assessment process. The authors will present a review of descriptive statistics of early childhood programs based on data from more than 1,000 preschool classrooms in a 3-state study of the reliability and validity of ECERS-3 with a discussion of how this type of data can help providers, programs, administrators, and policymakers. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of special issues in understanding assessment process and data, and review of implications of these issues for training, public policy, and resource allocation.
The webinar will be followed by a Q&A.
Richard M. Clifford, PhD, is a senior scientist emeritus at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author and editor of numerous publications on early education including works on early learning environments, public finance, and public policies affecting young children and their families. His research has had far reaching impact on both policy and practice in the United States and other countries. He is a past president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). He is a co-author of the Environment Rating Scales (ERS), most recently ECERS-3, ITERS-3 and FCCERS-3, as well as A Guide to Analyzing and Interpreting ECERS-3 Data (Teachers College Press).
Noreen Yazejian is Senior Research Scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Yazejian’s early childhood research and program evaluation studies have focused on professional development, models of programming birth to 5, home visiting, quality rating and improvement systems, early childhood language and literacy, and the use of data for continuous quality improvement. Her research has been published in Child Development, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Early Education and Development, Social Policy Report, and NHSA Dialog. She is a co-author of the Environment Rating Scales (ERS), most recently ITERS-3 and FCCERS-3, as well as A Guide to Analyzing and Interpreting ECERS-3 Data (Teachers College Press).
Wonkyung Jang, M.S., is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education. He is a co-author of "A Guide to Analyzing and Interpreting ECERS-3 Data" (Teachers College Press).
