This brief documents the first phase of work to develop and pilot test the Early Education Essentials surveys, created in partnership with Start Early, such as the framework underlying the surveys, describes our survey development process, defines the specific constructs measured by the surveys, and presents initial survey reliability results from a pilot study conducted in spring 2015.
In 2014, UChicago Consortium launched a partnership with Start Early to explore how the measurement of the five essentials could be adapted and applied to early childhood settings in an effort to help the early childhood field measure organizational conditions and consider how these conditions influence classroom practices.
This survey development brief documents the adaptation and refinement of the UChicago Consortium's K-12 5Essentials survey for use in publicly-funded early education programs, including federally-funded Head Start, state-, and locally-funded programs that provide center-based services (not home-based services) to three- and four-year-old children. The resulting Early Education Essentials consists of two surveys—one for early educators and one for parents—designed to capture indicators of processes occurring at the school or center level that, in prior research, have been linked to improvements in student learning. This brief encompasses the first two years of survey development.
