National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC): Performance Criteria and Assessment Instruments for Accreditation

Project Managers
Carollee Howes

Timeline

2003-2006

Research Aims
  • Work with NAEYC’s Accreditation Commission to assist in the revision and subsequent validation of its 18-year-old accreditation system.
  • In concert with the Commission, seek to align the new system with current research, streamline the implementation system, and develop measurable criteria for determining when standards are met.

Project Support

Funded by the National Association for the Education of Young Children


























Project Summary

This project entailed a two-part approach for making suggested revisions to the NAEYC accreditation system. The first was an annotated review of the current early education research literature to provide research-based evidence that either supports or contradicts performance standards and criteria proposed by NAEYC commissions, and to inform the selection of the final standards and criteria. Following the development of the revised accreditation tool, CICCQ conducted a validation study to determine construct validity of the new tool. A field test of the accreditation tool was conducted in 20 sites. Results from this field test were used to modify the instrument prior to the validation study.

During the validation study, measures used in large national studies of early childhood were used in conjunction with the new accreditation tool to determine if NAEYC’s definitions of quality are commensurate with those widely accepted in the early childhood field. The study utilized three measures: The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale – Revised Edition (ECERS-R) (Harms, T., Clifford, R. M., & Cryer, D., 1998); The Teacher Involvement Scale – Pre-Academic Scale (Ritchie, S., Howes, C., Kraft-Sayre, M., & Weiser, B., 2002) and; The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) (LaParo, K.M., Pianta, R.C., Stuhlman, M., & Hamre, B., 2002).

For the validation study, volunteer sites were recruited by invitation from sites seeking accreditation from NAEYC during the study period. Volunteers were asked to participate in both the field test and the validation study. Sites were a randomly selected, geographically stratified sample of accreditation applicants. Pairs of assessors visited randomly selected sites in several states. One assessor used the new accreditation tool while the other used the measures described above. Data was collected via direct observation in pre-school classrooms. CICCQ analyzed the results of the study to determine construct validity.