Classroom Quality, Concentration of Children With Special Needs, and Child Outcomes in Head

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Presented by Cheshta Khurana, Krishna Malyala, Tracy Perron, Wei Wei Song,

Mary Thomas & Carissa Visicaro

Graduate School of Education

Article Overview

In this article the associations among classroom quality, classroom percentage of children with special needs and child outcome measures were tested in low and high quality classrooms using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM).

(Gallagher & Lambert, 2006)

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METHODOLOGY

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Classroom Dynamics

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INSTRUMENTS

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Four Instruments Used

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The Assessment Profile for Early Childhood Programs: Research Edition II

The purpose was to evaluate the learning environment and teaching practices in classrooms for young children.

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Five Scales

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Validity

• The content validity was proved by a wide variety of early childhood professionals and a cross-reference of the items with the initial National Association for the Education for Young Children (NAEYC) Accreditation Criteria.

• For the criterion-related validity there was a significant correlation (r=0.64, p<0.001; r=0.74 p<0.000). The reliability coefficients for the five scales is between (0.81, 0.98) for the Spearman-Brown corrected split-half. IRT-based reliability coefficients for the five scales is between (0.83, 0.91).

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The Adaptive Social Behavior Inventory

The purpose was to measure children’s social functioning in the classroom and offer a balanced teacher assessment of the social dimensions of the development.

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Instrument yields four scores

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Reliability Coefficients

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The Metropolitan Early Childhood Assessment Program Pre-Literacy Inventory

The purpose was to asses print concepts, story retelling and pre-writing skills to 4 to 6-year olds.

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Reliability

• The Metropolitan Early Childhood Assessment Program Pre-Literacy Inventory has a concurrent validity correlation on 0.62 with the Metropolitan Readiness Test Composite Score.

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Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES)

The purpose was to collect family variables.

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Question Categories

• Household composition• Demographic background variables• Out-of-home care• Services the child has received• Satisfaction with Head Start services• Parental involvement in the program• Home learning activities • Services for children with special needs• The child’s social behavior• The child’s development• The transition to kindergarten • Household routines• Health and safety related issues• A broad range of home and neighborhood characteristics• Caregiver depression• Locus of control and social support

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Results

• The majority of the variance in each outcome independent of the source (parent, teacher or other assessor) was found to be within the classrooms. – Outcomes include: social behavior, parental report of problem,

pre-literacy, print concepts and story retelling.

• For the child-level models older children scored higher teacher ratings on the comply, express and prosocial scores and received higher scores on print concepts and story retelling.– Boys were rated by their teachers as being less compliant, less

expressive, more disruptive and had fewer prosocial behaviors than girls. Their parents also rated them to have more problem behaviors.

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Results Con’t

• Overall, children with more positive home environments (no exposure to violence, educated and involved parents, ect.) scored higher academically and had fewer reports of problem behavior.

• Overall, children with special needs were reported as scoring lower academically than normal developing children and were reported as having more problem behaviors.

• There were no associations found between class size, child to adult ratios or percentage of boys and the factors studied.

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Results Con’t

• Children who had teachers with higher quality classrooms scored higher on academic outcomes than children who had teachers with low quality classrooms.

• Children who had a higher percentage of special needs children in their class scored significantly higher on academic outcomes than children who had a low percentage of special needs children in their class.