Smart Start and Preschool Child Care Quality in North Carolina: Change Over Time and Relation to Children's Readiness

The primary goal of Smart Start is to ensure that all children enter school healthy and prepared to succeed. Smart Start has funded a variety of technical assistance (TA) activities to improve child care, including on-site technical assistance, quality improvement and facility grant, teacher educati...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Bryant, Donna, Maxwell, Kelly, Taylor, Karen, Poe, Michele, Peisner-Feinberg, Ellen, Bernier, Kathleen
Format: Report
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:The primary goal of Smart Start is to ensure that all children enter school healthy and prepared to succeed. Smart Start has funded a variety of technical assistance (TA) activities to improve child care, including on-site technical assistance, quality improvement and facility grant, teacher education scholarships, license upgrades, teacher salary supplements, and higher subsidies for increased child care quality or increased teacher education levels. This study included 110 preschool child care programs that were part of previous observational studies of North Carolina child care quality between 1994 and 1999. The study measured the quality of classroom practices and the center's level of participation in Smart Start-funded TA activities in the preceding year. From these classrooms, 512 preschoolers were assessed for their language, literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills. Findings suggested three main conclusions: (1) between 1993 and 2002, child care quality in this sample steadily and significantly increased; (2) participation in Smart Start-funded activities was significantly positively related child care quality, and (3) children who attended higher quality centers scored significantly higher than children in lower quality centers on measures of skills and abilities deemed important for kindergarten success. Although the study can not identify which Smart Start TA activities have been most effective at improving quality, it does show that Smart Start-funded activities are significantly related to preschool classroom quality. Classroom quality was significantly, positively related to children's outcomes, over and above the effects of gender, income, and ethnicity. (A list of child measures used in the study and brief findings are appended. Contains 22 references.) (HTH)