Early Childhood Education and Care in the Netherlands: Quality, Curriculum, and Relations with Child Development

Abstract

The studies reported in this dissertation are part of the national cohort study pre-COOL to evaluate the developmental and educational effects of early childhood education and care (ECEC) provisions in the Netherlands. More specifically, we evaluated the quality of a large representative sample of ECEC provisions and examined the effects of attending ECEC on the development of two-to-three year old children. ECEC quality can be defined by structural and process characteristics that are thought to nurture child development. Process quality refers to children’s daily experiences and encompasses the social, emotional, physical, and instructional aspects of children’s activities and interactions with teacher, peers, and, materials that are seen as proximal determinants of child development. Structural characteristics, such as group size or teachers’ qualifications, are the distal, more regulable aspects and are considered as important preconditions of process quality. In the current study an internationally widely used observational measure, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) developed in the United States, was used to assess Dutch ECEC quality. In the first study we evaluated the psychometric quality of the CLASS by combining approaches based on classical test theory (i.e., evaluating the factor structure) and item response theory (i.e. evaluating item difficulty and item discrimination). Overall, the psychometric quality of the CLASS was found to be satisfactory, although some problems emerged, possibly pointing to cultural differences in ECEC practices. The second study addressed the relationships between process quality and the structural characteristics, group size, children-to-teacher ratio, teachers’ qualifications, the use of an education program [VVE programma] and, continuous professional development in the center. The findings showed that the emotional quality in Dutch ECEC is moderate to high, whereas the educational quality is low to moderate. Our findings revealed a small effect of teacher’s qualifications, and stronger effects of the use of an education program and, particularly, continuous professional development . In the third study, the effects of curriculum activities and observed quality of ECEC on the development of children’s vocabulary and attention skills from age two to three years were investigated using of a value-added approach, controlling for possible selection effects and children’s prior skills. The findings revealed a small positive effect of observed emotional support on children’s vocabulary development and a stronger positive effect of observed support for learning on children’s attention skills. Small negative effects were found for the teacher-reported provision of free play on children’s vocabulary and attention development. No effects were found for teacher-reported provision of academic and self-regulation activities. Finally, in the fourth study we observed children’s cognitive and emotional self-regulation in play and related this to test-based measures of children’s cognitive and affective executive functions (EF). In addition, we investigated the role of contextual factors, including global classroom quality and the quality of pretend play. The findings revealed the usefulness of the observational measure for self-regulation in actual classroom behavior and showed differential relations with EF. Global classroom quality was not related to children’s observed self-regulation, whereas the quality of pretend play had a moderate to strong relation.