Quality of Interactions Between Preschool Teachers and Children in Toddler Classrooms of Public Childcare Centers in Santiago

Abstract

Interactions within preschool classrooms define the quality of early education. This study describes the quality of the interactions between educational agents and their 230 toddlers in 16 lower middle level classrooms of public daycare centers located in 14 municipalities of the Metropolitan Region of Chile. The quality of classroom interactions was measured with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System for the Toddler level (CLASS-T). A descriptive analysis of means indicated that both the Emotional and Behavioral Support domain and the Commitment to Learning Support domain attained a moderate level of quality (4.08 and 3.33 points out of 7 respectively). The weakest area of the latter domain was language development. Spearman's ordinal correlation revealed that interaction quality was not correlated with either educational agent characteristics, such as age, work experience, educational level, or studies complementary to their initial education, or classroom characteristics, such as the number of children per classroom. These results shed light on interaction quality in the lower middle level of preschool education—which has received limited scholarly attention—and have implications for improving early childhood education quality through more focused professional development programs for preschool teachers which differentiate between the levels of preschool education in Chile