The Early Education Essentials is reliable across multiple ECE settings¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2018 · checked against its sources 2026-10-08 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2021: tool and model accuracy changes quickly

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Scales created with a Rasch item response theory model showed reliability in multiple ECE settings. → Early Education Essentials: Testing Measurement Validity of an Organizational Conditions and Practices Tool for Early Childhood Education Settings 2018

Evidence¶

Early Education Essentials: Testing Measurement Validity of an Organizational Conditions and Practices Tool for Early Childhood Education Settings 2018¶

Early Education Essentials: Testing Measurement Validity of an Organizational Conditions and Practices Tool for Early Childhood Education Settings. (2018). https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/early-education-essentials-validation-surveys-measuring-early-education-organizational

q2 · i? · associational · r2

Measurement study in 81 school- and community-based ECE sites in a large Midwestern city, sampled via stratified random sampling. Rasch IRT scaling supported the finding that the survey "is reliable in multiple ECE settings." No reliability coefficients are printed in the available text.

"Using a Rasch item response theory model, scales were created; theory and exploratory factor analyses combined scales into higher level constructs called essentials."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• The Early Education Essentials is sensitive to site-level differences — related
• Strongly organized ECE programs create contexts more supportive of teaching, learning, and family engagement than weakly organized programs — related
• Some, but not all, measured organizational conditions are associated in expected directions with site-level ECE quality metrics — related
• Parents offer a unique perspective best captured by a distinct sixth essential, Parent Voice — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Rasch-based refinement reduced the Early Ed Essentials surveys to 24 teacher measures (122 items) and 9 parent measures (42 items) — related
• The validation study sample comprised 81 Chicago ECE sites with high teacher and parent survey response rates — related
• In the spring 2015 pilot, 19 of 27 teacher-survey measures met the 0.80 reliability threshold and all but one met 0.70; the Early Childhood Discipline measure was removed — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• All nine Cultivate learning condition measures show strong Rasch person reliability (0.82-0.87) in CPS administrations — related
• A large-scale long-term study examined the measurement stability of Rasch measurement scales that had been in place for almost 40 years — related
• Recalibrated 5Essentials measures based on 2014–19 data maintained acceptable Rasch reliability and school-level variance — related
• The final spring 2015 parent-survey pilot collected 253 parent responses across seven school-based and nine center-based Chicago preschool sites, in English and Spanish — related
• Maze-task reading performance from 1,258 first and second graders yields a reliable Rasch text-complexity scale — related