With three graduate students (Shan Sivakumaran and Sandarshi Gunawardena from the doctoral program, and Nancy Genich who has recently graduated from the master's program) our group has conducted some pilot work and written a funding proposal for development and testing of a new set of scales for assessing the physical environment of child care and other early childhood education facilities. We hope to continue this work during the current year with Dr. Naohiko Hayata contributing during his post-doctoral visit -- both submitting several proposals for funding and continuing with the development of the scale and some pilot testing.
Problem, purpose, and research questions. It is well known that the quality of child care matters to early childhood development for children in care. It is also becoming well documented that the physical environment of child care is an important component of quality.
In the majority of the literature on child care, however, when the construct of "environment" is invoked, it is most often limited to the social and organizational environment (e.g., amount and quality of adult interaction with children, type of curriculum) and not the planning of the physical environment. Quality is assessed, therefore, almost exclusively in terms of social and organizational variables, like caregiver style, curriculum, and materials available, and not in terms of environmental quality.
To make such assessments, a number of rating scales have been developed and are in wide use. Among the best known are the Early Childhood Assessment Profiles (Abbott-Shim & Sibley, 1992), the HOME Observation for Measurement of the Environment (Caldwell & Bradley, 1982), the various Early Childhood Environment Rating Scales (Harms, Cryer, & Clifford, 1980), and the Purdue Home Stimulation Inventory (Wachs, 1990).
Recently Dr. Moore was invited to prepare a critical review of the best known of these scales, the Harms and Clifford Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale published by Columbia University Teacher's College Press. The review was published in the Summer 1994 issue of Children's Environments. All of these scales -- including and especially the best known Harm's scales -- while only reasonably reliable, have questionable validity. More to the point of the current proposal, they are virtually silent on the qualities of the physical environment. That is, they do not assess the possible impact of physical environmental variables on quality in child care settings.
For example, in the Harm's and Clifford Infant/Toddler "Environment" Rating Scale (emphasis added), despite its name, only 8.8% of the items have any physical environmental content. To make matters worse, the environmental content of some test items is confounded with behavioral use patterns, and the scale is silent on a great number of physical environmental issues which we now know or have good reason to believe are important in the overall quality of child care.
The same can be said for the other scales currently available. Each has very interesting parts, like Wachs' Purdue Scale being explicitly theory driven, and Caldwell et al.'s HOME Scale having the most impressive reliability and validity data. Each has some environmental aspects, but none is specially focused on physical environmental issues, nor includes a wide range of physical environmental sub scales or items.
The goal of this research project, therefore, is to fill this gap by constructing and testing a new set of scales for the systematic description and evaluation of the physical environment of child care centers and related early childhood settings.
Research methods. The method, in a nutshell, will be to develop a series of scales and sub-scales that incorporate items based on a compilation of US and Canadian child care center building codes, licensing regulations, and accreditation standards of the National Academy for Early Childhood Development. But, more fundamentally, the proposed scales will be based on an underlying Piagetian theory of child-environment relations and what our group considers to be the 15 most important design principles for child care centers. The scales will be comprehensive including location and site, the spatial organization of the facility as a whole, the character of individual spaces, and outdoor activity areas.
The compilation of U.S. child care licensing regulations has already been accomplished by Dawn Miller. Some very exploratory efforts toward a new scale have already been made through an independent study by Nancy Genich. And some background literature and agency searches have been done by Shan Sivakumaran.
Based on all of this, we have been in contact with several colleagues around the country (Drs. Mon Cochran and Gary Evans at Cornell, Alan Pence at the University of Victoria, Sheridan Bartlett at U.Mass., Thelma Harms at the University of North Carolina, Allison Clarke-Stewart at UC-Irvine, and Theodore Wachs at Purdue) to gain their advise on the most worthy directions to pursue. We have also begun to contact agencies and foundations in the US and in Canada (being Canadian citizens, Gary Moore and Shan Sivakumaran are eligible also for and have received previous Canadian funding).
The scales will be subjected to standard reliability and validity tests based on criteria established and documented in the APA/AERA's Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests.
Product and possible significance. The end product will be a new set of scales for the description and evaluation of the physical environment of child care and related settings.
It is hoped that these scales will fill a wide gap in the literature and in professional tools available for research and assessment. It is also hoped the new scales will be useful for research purposes, for director's assessing their centers, for parents or parent advocacy groups for rating different centers, and perhaps for national accreditation bodies as a supplement to current accreditation criteria and procedures.
The ultimate significance, hopefully, will be the first set of truly environmental scales for child care centers, which will be based both on systematic test construction and evaluation procedures and on a major conceptualization of quality in child care settings.
Progress to date. In addition to doing some writing on the topic, and being in contact with leading scales developers around the US and Canada, we have also identified and begun to contact several possible sponsors for the research, including the following:
Research -- Actual work on the environmental scales project. Even short of receiving major funding -- which will support graduate and post-doctoral students to work on the project -- we hope in the interim to continue with the work starting this fall when Dr. Hayata arrives as a visiting post-doctoral fellow. In particular, we will develop the first full draft scale, and can begin to do some low-cost pilot work in the Milwaukee area. Dr. Naohiko Hayata has expressed considerable interest in this work, and will join this project as an active collaborator.
Professor Moore is applying for a sabbatical for part or all of 1997-98. The work will continue during the sabbatical period. In the event that he goes to the Technical University Eindhoven, his colleague, Dr. Joost Van Andel, is very interested in these scales, and in the event that he goes to Cornell University, his colleague there, Dr. Gary Evans, is equally interested in many of the methodological aspects of scale construction and validation.