WHAT SHAPE IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHILD OUTCOMES AND CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT SCORING SYSTEM?

儿童保育质量与儿童的结果有关，但高质量的儿童保育是罕见的。该项目的目标是提高对儿童成绩与教师与儿童互动（课堂评估评分系统或CLASS）之间定量关系的理解，该系统越来越多地用于项目改进和高风险应用，如质量评级和改进系统以及Head Start指定更新。该研究将使用单调广义加性模型（单调GAM）来分析CLASS（以及CLASS中的特定领域和维度）与Research Connections现有数据集中儿童结局之间可能的曲线关系。分析计划包括具体的假设曲线之间的关系类和孩子的结果，这将使我们能够测试存在低阈值实现强关系，高阈值，超过它的收益递减，和曲线之间的关系的差异的具体领域和层面的类。通过解决儿童保育观察工具和儿童的结果之间的联系的性质，该提案解决了目前与地方，州和国家各级决策者相关的两个研究课题：持续的儿童保育质量改善和儿童福祉。

Child care quality is associated with child outcomes, but high-quality child care is rare. The goal of this project is to improve the understanding of the quantitative relationship between child outcomes and a measure of teacher-child interactions (the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS) that is increasingly used in program improvement and in high-stakes applications such as quality rating and improvement systems and Head Start designated renewal. The study will use monotonic generalized additive models (monotonic GAM) to analyze the possibly curvilinear relationship between CLASS (and specific domains and dimensions within CLASS) and child outcomes in existing datasets available from Research Connections. The analysis plan includes specific hypotheses about curvilinear relationships between CLASS and child outcomes that will allow us to test for the presence of low thresholds for achieving strong relationships, high thresholds beyond which diminishing returns are seen, and differences in curvilinear relationships among specific domains and dimensions of the CLASS. By addressing the nature of the link between child care observation tools and child outcomes, this proposal addresses two research topics of current relevance to decision makers at local, state, and national levels: ongoing child care quality improvement and child wellbeing.