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

儿童保育质量与儿童结局相关，但高质量的儿童保育非常罕见。该项目的目标是提高对儿童成果与师生互动衡量指标（课堂评估评分系统，简称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“领先计划”指定更新。该研究将使用单调广义加性模型（单调GAM）来分析在Research Connections提供的现有数据集中，CLASS（以及CLASS中的特定域和维度）与儿童结果之间可能存在的曲线关系。分析计划包括关于CLASS和儿童结果之间曲线关系的具体假设，这将使我们能够测试实现强关系的低阈值的存在，超过高阈值就会看到收益递减，以及CLASS的特定领域和维度之间曲线关系的差异。通过解决儿童保育观察工具与儿童结果之间联系的本质，本提案解决了当前与地方、州和国家层面决策者相关的两个研究主题：持续改善儿童保育质量和儿童福祉。

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.