Early Education Essentials

Product or Programme · All products and programmes
Evidence · 12 claims (12 for) · 7 studies (4 associational, 1 causal, 1 qualitative, 1 design), q2 · 0 of 7 report an effect size · 11 claims rest on one study

Description

Early Ed Essentials is a teacher- and parent-survey assessment system developed by the Ounce of Prevention Fund and the University of Chicago Consortium to measure organizational supports in school- and center-based early-childhood education settings.

Components

• Early Ed Essentials teacher and parent survey measurement system: The Early Education Essential Organizational Supports measurement system (Early Ed Essentials) is a set of teacher and parent surveys developed by the Ounce of Prevention Fund and the UChicago Consortium "to measure the organizational supports of school and center-based ECE settings." Its purpose is to give programs reliable, valid data to diagnose strengths and weaknesses in organizational conditions so staff can strengthen the conditions that enable effective teaching. The original teacher survey included 26 measures and 164 items; the original parent survey included 9 measures and 54 items. (Ehrlich et al. (2018))
• Five Essentials—Early Education surveys: teacher and parent surveys measuring five organizational constructs in pre-k settings: The Five Essentials—Early Education is a single survey tool measuring the five organizational constructs (effective instructional leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environments, ambitious instruction) through the perceptions of teachers and parents in publicly-funded programs serving three- and four-year-olds. The teacher survey draws heavily on the K-12 5Essentials teacher survey "in use for over 20 years," while the parent survey was created anew. Questions are combined into measures analyzed with the Rasch IRT model, modeled after the K-12 5Essentials approach. (Ehrlich et al. (2016))

Claims

• Rasch-based refinement reduced the Early Ed Essentials surveys to 24 teacher measures (122 items) and 9 parent measures (42 items) [+W]
• The validation study sample comprised 81 Chicago ECE sites with high teacher and parent survey response rates [+W]
• Preschool classrooms in the validation sample scored lowest on Instructional Support relative to Emotional Support and Classroom Organization [+W]
• Site-level pre-k attendance in the validation sample averaged 85.2 percent and varied widely across sites [+W]
• Parent focus groups showed parents could not report on specific classroom instructional interactions, so ambitious instruction items were developed for the teacher survey instead, and a new Teacher Care and Responsiveness towards Parents measure was created [+W]
• 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 [+W]
• 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 [+W]
• Parents offer a unique perspective best captured by a distinct sixth essential, Parent Voice [+W]
• The Early Education Essentials is reliable across multiple ECE settings [+W]
• Strongly organized ECE programs create contexts more supportive of teaching, learning, and family engagement than weakly organized programs [+W]
• Elementary schools strong in three or more of the five essential supports were ten times more likely to substantially improve student math and reading scores (attributed to Bryk et al., 2010) [+W]
• Fewer than 10 percent of elementary schools with a sustained weakness in one essential support showed improvements in student outcomes (attributed to Bryk et al., 2010) [+W]

Related Products and Programmes

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Key Sources

• Ehrlich, S.B., Pacchiano, D.M., Stein, A.G., Wagner, M.R., Luppescu, S., Park, S., Frank, E., Lewandowski, H., & Young, C. (2018). Organizing early education for improvement: Testing a new survey tool. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and the Ounce of Prevention Fund. https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/organizing-early-education-improvement-testing-new-survey-tool
• Ehrlich, S.B., Pacchiano, D.M., Stein, A.G., & Luppescu, S. (2016). Essential organizational supports for early education: The development of a new survey tool to measure organizational conditions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and the Ounce of Prevention Fund. http://consortium.uchicago.edu/surveys

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	product
id	early-education-essentials
title	Early Education Essentials
description	Early Ed Essentials is a teacher- and parent-survey assessment system developed by the Ounce of Prevention Fund and the University of Chicago Consortium to measure organizational supports in school- and center-based early-childhood education settings.
status	review
moved_from	element/early-ed-essentials-survey-measurement-system, element/five-essentials-early-education-surveys
product_kind	assessment
generated	by process:sweep-kinds on 2026-10-10
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	2 — ehrlich-2018, ehrlich-2016

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