ABSTRACT
This chapter is an update of an earlier review of measures evaluating the quality of early childhood education (Farran & Hofer, 2013), efforts complicated by the different histories and missions of programs in this field. In the six years between our original chapter and this one, Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRISs) have been adopted by many states. We review the research on the utility of QRIS overall and then examine their individual components, all of which have been used separately in research for many years. We confirm that the child outcomes found to be most important for later school success are math, reading (language/literacy), and attention (self-regulation). As we show, none of the quality measures currently in the field have demonstrated much capacity for identifying classrooms that are more effective in helping children learn those skills. We review some newer, alternative efforts to measure quality and delineate issues that make the earlier ones deliver so much less than promised. The next steps in developing an effective measure of classroom quality are empirical investigations of the behaviors of teachers and children demonstrably linked to gains in those skill areas found to be important for long-term success.
