Implementation Lessons from Six Early Head Start - Child Care Partnerships

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: This study examined the development and implementation of six Early Head Start Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCPs), unique collaborations between EHS grantees and community-based child care partners that expand access to high-quality child care and comprehensive services for low-income infants, toddlers, and their families. Interviews and focus groups with 111 key informants identified similarities across the six EHS-CCPs in initial outreach to community partners for establishing partnerships and approaches to developing partnership agreements but variation in approaches to monitoring quality improvement activities. Benefits and challenges to partnerships for programs and families were noted. Practice or Policy: Findings suggest a need for additional guidance for EHS-CCPs on key components of implementation, including the partnership agreement process, monitoring quality improvement plans, offering support for meeting program requirements, and providing comprehensive services. For example, five of the six partnerships reported the EHS grantee led the development of their partnership agreements. While this approach was attributed to child care partners’ lack of prior experience in developing agreements, further guidance on how to engage partners collaboratively in an agreement process that better emulates the principles of authenticity and equality from the conceptual framework for collaborations in early care and education would be useful.     

Students and the Governance of Higher Education: A UK perspective

Tertiary Education and Management - In the United Kingdom, the higher education landscape has undergone a transformation since the late 1980s as seen in the “massification” of higher...     

The generalizability of student ratings of instructors: Item specificity and section effects

A number of recent studies have used generalizability theory to examine the dependability of student ratings of instruction. This study extends this line of research by examining the consistency of ratings between different sections of a course taught in a given semester by the same instructor, and by comparing the performance of global- and attribute-type instructor rating items. Five samples of physics instructors, varying in size from 5 to 12 instructors, were rated by their students on a form containing two global and eight attribute items. Each instructor taught two sections of a course. The study found that the section effect was small (ratings of instructors were consistent across different sections of the same course), and that the generalizability of ratings was substantially influenced by item specificity. For summary purposes, one global item seemed sufficient.     

Inferences About Variance Components and Reliability-Generalizability Coefficients in the Absence of Random Sampling

Generalizability theory (G theory) employs random-effects ANOVA to estimate the variance components included in generalizability coefficients, standard errors, and other indices of precision. The ANOVA models depend on random sampling assumptions, and the variance-component estimates are likely to be sensitive to violations of these assumptions. Yet, generalizability studies do not typically sample randomly. This kind of inconsistency between assumptions in statistical models and actual data collection procedures is not uncommon in science, but it does raise fundamental questions about the substantive inferences based on the statistical analyses. This article reviews criticisms of sampling assumptions in G theory (and in reliability theory) and examines the feasibility of using representative sampling, stratification, homogeneity assumptions, and replications to address these criticisms.     

The validity of current criticism

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