Are the indicators for the Language and Reasoning Subscale of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale‐Revised psychometrically appropriate for Caribbean classrooms?

Expert practitioner's views about the Chinese early childhood environment rating scale

“…It makes sense to start our work with what researchers around the world (Harms, Clifford, and Cryer 1998;Sylva et al 2006;Mathers et al 2007;Lambert et al 2008) have discovered about ECEC quality evaluation, and the level of quality captured through quality dimension indicators of the ECERS-R. During a large pilot study involving 105 Kindergarten classrooms, Hu (2013) explored how cultural differences in educational emphasis can affect quality ratings by using the ECERS-R to validate one large province's Kindergarten Quality Rating System (KQRS) in China in terms of its accuracy in differentiating levels of quality. Generally speaking, the total ECERS-R scores seem to support the KQRS in terms of its purpose, which is to construct continuous rating (Li 2010).…”

“…Finally, a review of the literature on ECEC quality evaluation in international contexts (Sylva et al 2006;Mathers et al 2007;Lambert et al 2008) provided helpful insights for our development of the CECERS. For instance, Lambert et al (2008) uses Item Response Theory to examine the psychometric properties of the languagereasoning scale of the ECERS-R in Caribbean contexts, confirming that the scale cannot accurately detect whether programmes are of moderate or high quality, but rather detects those whose quality is at or below the mean.…”

“…For instance, Lambert et al (2008) uses Item Response Theory to examine the psychometric properties of the languagereasoning scale of the ECERS-R in Caribbean contexts, confirming that the scale cannot accurately detect whether programmes are of moderate or high quality, but rather detects those whose quality is at or below the mean. Mathers et al (2007) express concerns about using the ECERS-R as a professional development tool since the rating of 'excellent' does not fully capture superior quality.…”

“…China presents unique contextual features, such as a hierarchical social system, a collectivistic culture, and an ill-balanced development in economic and social resources amongst regions (Hu and Li 2012). These unique contextual features require special considerations when defining the quality of ECEC and developing the quality evaluation systems, which means that simply translating a widely used instrument, such as the ECERS-R, into Chinese is unjustifiable for its use in Chinese contexts (Lambert et al 2008;Moss and Dahlberg 2008). Researchers in England also supported this notion by creating the ECERS-Extension to measure achievement in basic academic skills of young children (Sylva et al 2006).…”

Comparative studies of mathematics teaching: does the means of analysis determine the outcome?

“…In such circumstances, where researchers are seeking to uncover relationships between variables, exploratory factor analyses (EFA) in general and principal components analyses in particular are appropriate (Fabrigar et al 1999;Henson and Roberts 2006). With respect to classroom observation rating scales, exploratory factor analyses have been exploited in a number of kindergartenrelated studies, including an examination of children's play with particular toys (TrawickSmith et al 2011) and the quality of their classrooms (La Paro et al 2004;Lambert et al 2008;Jeon et al 2010). Of significance to this study is the growing evidence that data derived from observational rating scales, even in dichotomous forms, can be subjected to exploratory factor analyses (Jeon et al 2010 Before factor analyses were undertaken, due to their infrequency across all sixteen lesson sequences, four items were removed from the analysis.…”