Connection between the classroom quality of a pre-school institution and children's outcomes: a theoretic overview

Abstract

The paper presents a systematic review of studies of the connection between preschool children outcomes and the quality of the classroom educational environment. The ECERS-R and CLASS tools were used in these studies for the quality assessment of the educational environment. The ECERS-R provides a global assessment of the environmental quality, which is calculated on the basis of individual areas of assessment: Space and Its Arrangement, Child Care and Supervision, Speech and Thinking, Activities, Children's Activity, Interaction, Program Structuring, Parents and Staff. The CLASS is developed for a more detailed assessment of teacher-child interactions and includes three parameters: Emotional Support, Classroom Organization and Instructional Support. Thus, the ECERS-R provides information on the structural component of the quality of the educational environment to a greater extent, whereas the CLASS provides information on the process component. The review included 20 studies that examined the relationship between the indicators of children's mental development with a general assessment using the ECERS-R and three scales of the CLASS. The results of the research analysis are presented in the form of a generalized review of correlation studies and a systematic review of studies using dispersion and regression procedures for data analysis. The review of correlation studies made it possible to find links at the level of the tendency between structural and process components of educational quality with indicators of cognitive, executive functions and emotional-personal development of preschool children. While studies using regression and dispersion procedures of data analysis convincingly show that the quality evaluation of the educational environment has predictive capabilities for the mental development of children, several studies have found that children's cognitive and emotional-personal development is more intensive in groups with higher scores on the CLASS and ECERS-R, than in groups with low and average ratings. The development of executive functions is related to the procedural component of the quality of the educational environment, as assessed by the CLASS. In the reviewed studies, there was no correlation between the ECERS-R assessment and the development of children's executive functions. This review can be useful for researchers of the quality of preschool education in Russia, since it presents systematic results of foreign studies and information on the effectiveness of methods they use. The study of the connection between the quality of the educational environment and the successes of the mental development of preschool children requires a further study using the Russian sampling.