Promoting School Readiness in Child Care Centers

描述(由申请人提供)：这项研究的中心目标是提高服务于社会经济弱势社区的托儿中心的能力，以实施以证据为基础的课程内容和教学实践，促进入学准备。一个相关的目标是测试由合作扩展管理的可持续的、技术辅助的专业发展支持平台Better Kid Care(BKC)的有效性。72个托儿中心将从宾夕法尼亚州7个经济压力大的县的372个为低收入儿童服务的合格中心中招募。这些中心很难提供以证据为基础的教育方案，尽管有兴趣这样做，因为教师教育水平低，工作人员流动率高，没有足够的机会获得课程材料和专业发展支持。参与者将包括72名幼儿中心主任，约200名课堂教师，以及约600名4岁学龄前儿童。将使用REDI(研究型，发展型)计划的课程组成部分和教学策略，包括促进社会情感学习的学前路径课程，以及三个以证据为基础的组成部分(即对话阅读、语音意识培训和字母中心活动)，以培养语言新兴的识字技能。BKC的技术辅助远程学习平台将用于扩展专业发展支持。课堂教师将能够访问简短的教程，其中包含演示如何授课和说明高质量教学实践的视频。此外，中心主任将接受培训，担任当地教练，从而在教师流失率较高的情况下为项目的可持续性提供基础。BKC平台将用于支持托儿中心主任的虚拟学习社区，这些主任将接受培训，以监测计划实施的保真度，并指导教师应用课程组成部分和教学策略。评估将使用严格的随机对照设计，采用多种方法衡量儿童和教师的结果；它将评估托儿中心的短期可持续性，并跟踪儿童 他们过渡到幼儿园。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The central goal of this study is to enhance the capacity of child-care centers serving socioeconomically disadvantaged communities to implement evidence-based curriculum components and teaching practices that promote school readiness. A related goal is to test the efficacy of a sustainable, technology-assisted platform fo professional development support, Better Kid Care (BKC), managed by Cooperative Extension. 72 child-care centers will be recruited from more than 372 eligible centers serving low income children in 7 economically stressed counties in Pennsylvania. These centers struggle to provide evidence-based educational programming, despite an interest in doing so, due to low levels of teacher education, high staff turnover, and inadequate access to curriculum materials and professional development support. Participants will include 72 child care center directors, approximately 200 classroom teachers, and approximately 600 4-year-old prekindergarten children. The curriculum components and teaching strategies of the REDI (Research-based, Developmentally Informed) program will be used, including the Preschool PATHS Curriculum to promote social-emotional learning, and three evidence-based components (i.e., dialogic reading, phonological awareness training, and alphabet center activities) to foster language-emergent literacy skills. The technology-assisted distance learning platform of BKC will be used to extend professional development support. Classroom teachers will be able to access brief tutorials with videos demonstrating how to deliver lessons and illustrating high-quality teaching practices. In addition, center directors will be trained to serve as local coaches, thereby providing a foundation for program sustainability in the face of high teacher turnover. The BKC platform will be used to support virtual learning communities of child-care center directors, who will be trained to monitor the fidelity of program implementation and coach teachers in the application of the curriculum components and teaching strategies. The evaluation will use a rigorous, randomized-controlled design, with multi- method measurement of child and teacher outcomes; it will assess short-term sustainability in the child care centers and follow children as they transition to kindergarten.