Tamara Halle

This brief explores areas for refining, extending, and developing measures of quality for early childhood education and school-age care settings. It focuses on identifying the practices and aspects of the environment that support specific domains of children’s school readiness as well as two specific contexts of development (families and culture).

This brief reviews previous research regarding the importance of identifying the purposes of measurement, distinguishes among different purposes for conducting assessments ofquality in early childhood settings, discusses the need for precaution when assessments seek to address multiple purposes at once, and raises implications for developing future measures.

A paper addressing the problems with definition and measurement of the early childhood workforce.