Learning from Experience Evaluating Early Childhood Demonstration Programs (1982) / Chapter Skim
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Measuring the Outcomes of Day Care
Measuring the Outcomes of Day Care
Pages 109-162
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From page 109... ...
This heterogeneity poses major challenges for outcome measurement. It requires an arsenal of measures appropriate to different goals, different settings, and different client populations.
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From page 110... ...
under Title IV-A of the Social Security Act are allowed to earn income above the maximum levels normally permitted for those receiving such aid, provided that the surplus is spent for child care. The system is designed to prevent the cost of child care from becoming a barrier to prevent welfare mothers from entering the labor force.
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From page 111... ...
For example, different measures are needed to assess an exemplary day care program designed to demonstrate innovative techniques for educating children and a model information and referral system or a voucher experiment designed to demonstrate ways to stimulate private initiative and maximize parental choice. Given the multiplicity of goals of day care programs, of day care constituencies, and of demonstrations in day care, it seems obvious that outcome research must itself be multifaceted.
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From page 112... ...
There is, however, heated controversy over the proper public response to this apparent increase in need. Some commentators, often remarking on the activist family policies of the governments of other industrialized nations, have argued for increased public subsidy of child care.
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From page 113... ...
. (This survey employed a relatively strict definition of the term "day care center" and excluded mixed care arrangements, in which children are in nursery school for part of the day and in family day care for the rest of the day.)
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From page 114... ...
Until recently, research has neglected the informal care arrangements that affect most children under three and many older children as well. Although the role of government in child care is a bitterly debated topic, massive involvement of government at all levels, especially the federal level, is already a reality -- with which outcome measurement must deal if it is to be relevant to policy.
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From page 115... ...
States and a few localities maintain licensing codes, which set standards that child care facilities must meet in order to be allowed to operate. These codes affect virtually all centers and, in some areas, family day care homes as well.
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From page 116... ...
Thus, whether one views federal and state regulations as necessary and benevolent attempts to set a floor under the quality of care or an unwarranted intrusion of government in the child care market, some form of regulation is a reality for most centers but for only a fraction of family day care homes. In sum, government at all levels is heavily involved in child care.
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From page 117... ...
A related development is the growth of information and referral services, some of them publicly subsidized; these services are designed to facilitate the match between parental needs and existing child care resources. The increased labor force participation of women also has led to the beginnings of new demands on unions and employers to include child care in employee benefit packages.
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From page 118... ...
Children need a safe and pleasant physical environment, appealing and nutritious food, and, in some cases, special services such as diagnostic screening and health care, which may be available only through day care. The need to measure development comprehensively -- not to rely on traditional measures of cognitive skill or ability that have been used in evaluating other programs for children -- has been widely recognized but only partially met by day care researchers.
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From page 119... ...
While the employees often share with the children and parents a concern for many of the outcomes deemed important in child care (such
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From page 120... ...
Sixth is the research community, particularly (1) experts on child development and the family and (2)
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From page 121... ...
Is parents' knowledge about day care options sufficient or increasing, so they can make informed choices among services? Do different types of care (e.g., family day care homes, small group homes, larger day care centers)
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From page 122... ...
For example, day care often "sells" as a device for reducing welfare rolls because many middle-class voters view the reduction of welfare expenditures as a legitimate goal but are reluctant to support underwriting additional social services. From this perspective, the reduction of welfare rolls or overall taxpayer cost savings (the cost of welfare compared with the cost of child care, training, and job placement)
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From page 123... ...
Although substantive findings are mentioned, the discussion is not a comprehensive review of the literature nor does it comment systematically on the quality of research designs or the soundness of substantive conclusions. The taxonomy of measures represents a widening circle, beginning with children and the effects of day care on their daily experiences and development, then spiraling outward to encompass providers, parents and families, the community, and ultimately the entire child care and social service delivery systems.
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From page 124... ...
Such a narrow focus of evaluation places the burden of proof of merit on measures and modes of analysis that, given the current state of the art, inherently limit the ability of a program to demonstrate its worth. Moreover, exclusive focus on individual change ignores the goals and practices of many day care programs and providers, and it implies value judgments that are open to question, particularly with respect to the justification for public subsidy for the care of the children of the poor.
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From page 125... ...
In the National Day Care Study (Ruopp et al., 1979) , preschool children in classrooms with high levels of cooperation and engagement in activities involving reflection and innovation on the part of the child also performed well on standardized tests of cognitive development.
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From page 126... ...
Crowding or its absence, lighting, color, noise level, the accessibility of materials as opposed to their sheer physical presence, the layout of space as opposed to its sheer size, the presence or absence of private places, and countless other physical characteristics of child care settings can potentially affect children's behavior within those settings. Two recent review papers on the effects of the physical environment in day care (Prescott and David, 1976; Krovant et al., 1976)
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From page 127... ...
There is a lack, not of potential measures, but of well-founded knowledge about which measures to use and how to combine specific indicators so as to form more general and meaningful variables characterizing the physical environment. Supplementary Services Day care facilities, especially centers serving children from low-income families, often provide "supplementary" services such as nutrition, health, and dental care.
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From page 128... ...
Interaction with Care Givers and Peers The study of children's behavior in group settings, including but not limited to day care, has an extensive history in developmental psychology. Until recently, most studies were theoretically motivated, designed to identify consistent dimensions of behavior and sometimes to relate them to characteristics of the setting or the supervising adult (for example, see Baumrind and Black, 1967, Becker and Krug, 1964, Kohn and Rosman, 1972, Peterson, 1961, Schaefer, 1961)
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From page 129... ...
. These studies, varying widely in scope and emphasis, suggest that naturalistic observations of children and care givers can potentially be used to capture important elements of quality in child care and to discriminate among different types of day care environments.
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From page 130... ...
Thus, if observational measures are to fulfill their promise, a great deal must be learned about the properties of alternative recording strategies and possible trade-offs between expense and objectivity. Developmental Change As indicated earlier, most research on the effects of day care arising within the disciplines of developmental psychology and early childhood education has focused on changes in children's social and cognitive development.
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From page 131... ...
variations within center care that were associated with different staffing and grouping patterns. Research on children in group settings began as early as the 1930s, when the first studies of the effects of nursery school entered the literature of child development.
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From page 132... ...
Another line of research, beginning a decade or so after the nursery school studies and extending into the 1960s, sheds much-needed light on the dark underside of child care: the care of infants and young children in institutions. Rene Spitz's influential essays documented appalling rates of apathy and morbidity among infants in institutions where care was inadequate and inconsistent (Spitz, 1945)
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From page 133... ...
. However, many day care researchers have used invalidated variants of the "strange situation," often with children two years old or older.
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From page 134... ...
Research on child care turned toward heavy emphasis on cognitive skills during the 1960s. Influential basic research studies and syntheses pointed to the malleability of intelligence (Hunt, 1961; Bloom, 1964)
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From page 135... ...
The various studies do not lend themselves to easy summary; no overwhelming positive or negative effects of day care have emerged. What is more important here is the sheer variety of outcomes and outcome measures, and the fact that no consensus has emerged as to what should be measured and how.
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From page 136... ...
The tests are generally designed to be insensitive to specific learning experiences, making them questionable as outcome measures for intervention programs of any kind. The most widely used tests do not attempt to measure creativity, persistence, flexibility, and resourcefulness in attacking problems or a host of other aspects of cognitive skill and style that may ultimately indicate much about a child's potential as a learner or future ability to use what is learned.
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From page 137... ...
However, there is massive evidence throughout the literature of child development (summarized most pointedly by Bronfenbrenner, 1979) that situational and cultural contexts profoundly affect young children's behavior.
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From page 138... ...
This focus is obviously appropriate to the fields in question -- but if the policy maker's broad concerns for access, equity, and efficiency as well as quality are to be addressed, disciplinary boundaries will have to be broken and new, integrative efforts at measurement must be undertaken. Some tentative steps already taken in this direction are discussed in the later section on the effects of alternative day care policies on the child care delivery system.
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From page 139... ...
studies of the effects of the availability of child care on parental
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From page 140... ...
We lack a systematic theoretical treatment of the aspects of family functioning that might be affected by day care. Second, the above listing does not differentiate day care programs that have active parent counseling or education components from those that do not.
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From page 141... ...
There do not yet appear to be studies that relate the availability of child care at the community level to social indicators bearing on the health of families within communities -- e.g., rates of divorce and desertion, child abuse, out-of-home placements of children, etc. Parent Preferences and Parent Satisfaction A number of studies have used interviews and questionnaires to assess parent preferences for different types of day care arrangements as well as parents' satisfaction with the child care facilities they use (e.g., Hill, 1977, 1978; Steinberg and Green, 1979; Rowe et al., 1972; Fosburg and Hawkins, 1981)
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From page 142... ...
However, as a reviewer of the literature on parent involvement -- and a strong advocate for it -- notes, "the assumption that some form of parent participation would increase parental proximity to surrogate child care establishments, and that increased proximity would improve the quality of child care or ease the child's transition from home to institution, has never been directly assessed" (rein, 1976)
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From page 143... ...
The principal determinants are rather the availability of suitable jobs and the existence of other barriers to employment of lowincome women. The studies suggest that readily accessible child care services induce no more than 10 percent of nonworking, low-income mothers to enter the work force; the figure is higher if families having children under three are excluded.
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From page 144... ...
Also, cost-benefit studies of subsidized day care have for the most part been based on the assumption that developmental day care centers will be the orincinal delivery mechanism. strafe that informal day care arrangements such as neighborhood family day care are currently used by working mothers with far greater frequency than are formal centers.
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From page 145... ...
Effects of Alternative Day Care Policies on the Child Care Service Delivery System This section returns to the issue with which our taxonomy of day care outcomes began: service delivery. We began by considering the services received by the individual child and argued that they could legitimately be considered outcomes of care for some purposes.
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From page 146... ...
They also need to know how public services interact with preexisting private mechanisms of service delivery. For example, does public subsidy of day care reduce dependence on the extended family as a source of child care?
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From page 147... ...
Second, day care research in developmental psychology has for the most part sought to compare the long-term developmental effects resulting from group care as opposed to home rearing. Much attention has focused on attachment to the mother and on cognitive skills as measured by standardized tests.
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From page 148... ...
Only limited attempts have been made to differentiate the effects of center care from those of family day care; in-home care by persons other than the parent -- relatives or paid helpers -- has hardly been studied at all. Third, except in the areas of income and employment, effects of day care on parents, families, and communities have received insufficient attention.
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From page 149... ...
All this, of course, is a tall order, tantamount to saying that we need a more mature science of developmental psychology. But until we begin to achieve these goals, we must be extremely cautious about evaluating programs in terms of their developmental effects as currently measurable.
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From page 150... ...
Once again, an interplay of basic and applied research is indicated. Specific effort must be devoted to inventing measures of children's experiences and development that capture the distinctive advantages and disadvantages of the different environments in which they receive nonparental care, i.e., centers, family day care homes, the homes of relatives, and their own homes.
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From page 151... ...
Yet ultimately science puts its intellectual pieces back together in a new and more meaningful way. Perhaps through interdisciplinary borrowing and sustained attention to day care itself, as a developmental environment, an adjunct support for families, a social service, and a policy tool, we can begin to reassemble the jigsaw-puzzle picture left us by existing studies in psychology, sociology, economics, and policy research.
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From page 152... ...
(1979) Observation Study of Care Givers and Children in Day Care Homes: Preliminary Results from Home Observations.
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From page 153... ...
Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, San Francisco, March. Clarke-Stewart, K
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From page 154... ...
(1981) Final Report of the National Family Day Care Home Study.
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From page 155... ...
(1977) The child care market: a review of the evidence and implications for federal policy.
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From page 156... ...
(1977) Labor force participation of married women, March 1976.
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From page 157... ...
(1973) The relationship between substitute child care, maternal employment and female marital satisfaction.
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From page 158... ...
Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, Pa., March. Prescott, E., and David, T
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From page 159... ...
Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, Colo., April. Ricciuti, H
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From page 160... ...
(1974) The Utilization of Subsidized Child Care in the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment: A Preliminary Report.
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From page 161... ...
(1975) National Child Care Consumer Study: 1975.
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From page 162... ...
(1969) Child development reseach: an edifice without a foundation.
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