Measuring the Interactive Skills of Caregivers in Child Care Centers: Development and Validation of the Caregiver Interaction Profile Scales

Research Findings: High-quality caregiver–child interactions constitute the core of high-quality child care for young children. This article describes the background and development of the Caregiver Interaction Profile (CIP) scales to rate 6 key skills of caregivers for interacting with 0- to 4-year-old children in child care centers: sensitive responsiveness, respect for autonomy, structuring and limit setting, verbal communication, developmental stimulation, and fostering positive peer interactions. Each interactive skill is rated on a 7-point scale based on observation of video-recorded caregiver–child interactions. Together, the 6 scale scores constitute an Interaction Profile for individual caregivers that may serve as a starting point for education and training to improve the quality of caregiver–child interactions. This article also presents the results of a 1st study with the CIP scales, in a sample of 145 caregivers from 75 child care groups in 47 child care centers in The Netherlands. Practice or Policy: Results provide promising preliminary evidence supporting the reliability and validity of the CIP scales.     

Recruitment to Teaching: The Changing Impact of Social Origins in Norway 1975–2010

Concerns about the status of the teaching profession are widespread. In this paper, the social selection to teacher education is compared with the social selection to other higher education courses in Norway from 1975 to 2010. This comparison can shed light on changes in the status of teaching relative to other types of higher education. Using enrolment data supplied by educational institutions, this study examines whether the recruitment to teacher education has changed in a manner that reflects a unique decline in teacher status. The analyses show that the social selection to teacher education has declined. However, a similar decline is found for recruitment to other educational fields. Thus, the results suggest that the declining status of teaching is part of a larger trend in which the status of bachelor’s level applied educational fields declined relative to traditional university courses.     

Web geometry laboratory: case studies in Portugal and Serbia

The role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education is well recognised – learning environments where the ICT features included are being proposed for many years now. The Web Geometry Laboratory (WGL) innovates in proposing a blended learning, collaborative and adaptive learning Web-environment for geometry. It integrates a well-known dynamic geometry system providing an adaptive environment where face-to-face activities can be combined with computer-mediated activities, in a collaborative or stand-alone, synchronous or asynchronous, classroom or homework way. The WGL collaborative environment allows each student to capitalise on one another's resources and skills. Its adaptive module gives to each teacher the ability to assess the geometric level of each student, allowing the teacher to build the individual profile and/or learning paths. In this paper we begin describing what are the goals that support the development of such an environment, the goals that support our beliefs in the usefulness of such an environment for the teaching and learning of geometry, after which we describe the environment and the case studies already conducted.