The quest for quality in early day care and preschool experience continues

Abstract

In research in the areas of day care for young children and preschool education at the end of the second millennium, common themes can be recognised. Early research was primarily concerned with whether children attending institutions (day care or preschool centre), developed differently from those not attending such centres. Later work recognised that day care or preschool experience is not unitary and that the quality or characteristic of experience matters. Yet further research drew attention to the importance of the interaction between home and out of home experience. These have been referred to as the three waves of research. In the 1980s, the proposition emerged that infant day care may be a risk factor for insecure attachment to the mother. In an ideologically and politically sensitive ” eld, the concern raised by this proposition that day care might be bad for infants, led to the funding of one of the largest studies of day care, the NICHD study. The results of this study so far indicate that quality of care is an important aspect of child care experience. This study is likely to be a watershed in that the sample size and detail of data are far greater than preceding studies. The conclusion that quality of experience for young children matters however, sets the agenda for research in the new millennium. Currently, approaches to this issue generally adopt the strategy of using a measure of child care quality and investigating associations with child development outcomes. An alternative approach derives from school effectiveness research. Children from specific centres are followed longitudinally. Their developmental progress is then considered in terms of family factors, type amount and quality of centre experience, and the specific centre attended. In this approach the presence of specific centre effects can be detected so that a specific centre can be identi” ed as associated with a quantifiable positive or negative effect on development. The resulting incongruence between traditional measures of quality and measures derived from developmental effects will require a reformulation of the links between child care characteristics, child experience, and developmental outcomes. As measures of quality become more ”rmly related to developmental outcomes child care research can become more integrated within developmental psychology.