The Early Education Essentials framework: six organizational essential supports for ECE programs¶

Theory · All theories
Evidence · 7 claims (7 for) · 2 studies (1 associational, 1 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 7 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The Early Education Essentials is a measurement and organizing framework adapting the UChicago Consortium's 5Essentials for early childhood settings, comprising teacher/staff and parent surveys of organizational conditions. The article names the essentials: "Effective Instructional Leaders, Collaborative Teachers, Involved Families, Supportive Environment, and Ambitious Instruction," plus a distinct sixth essential, Parent Voice, added because parents offered a unique perspective. The framework underpins the validation study and the qualitative contrasts reported here.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Surveys measuring the essentials must be administered to teachers/staff and parents in school-based and community-based ECE settings

Constraints¶

• The article states most ECE schools/centers fall somewhere in the middle between the very strong and very weak extreme cases studied

Target Learners¶

• preschool children in school-based and community-based early education programs

Target Learning Objectives¶

• children's social-emotional development and foundational skills in thinking, literacy, math, and science

Claims¶

• Family voices contributed to differentiating strong and weak organizational conditions across all essentials, not only Involved Families [+W]
• Parents offer a unique perspective best captured by a distinct sixth essential, Parent Voice [+W]
• Programs with strong essential supports are more likely to have higher teacher-child interactions and better child attendance than programs with very weak supports [+W]
• Strongly organized ECE programs create contexts more supportive of teaching, learning, and family engagement than weakly organized programs [+W]
• The Early Education Essentials is reliable across multiple ECE settings [+W]
• The Early Education Essentials is sensitive to site-level differences [+W]
• Some, but not all, measured organizational conditions are associated in expected directions with site-level ECE quality metrics [+W]

Related Theories¶

• Six organizational conditions of early childhood education programs as higher-level essentials constructs
• Five Essential Supports framework for improving student learning
• The five essential supports framework: five mutually reinforcing organizational dimensions that enable or inhibit improvement in classroom practices
• The Five Essential Supports framework identifies five organizational conditions for school improvement
• The Five Essential Supports framework organizes school climate measurement into five key components of student learning
• The Five Essential Supports framework organizes school development measures
• Cultivate framework of nine classroom learning conditions plus learning strategies and beliefs

Examples¶

• Early Education Essentials surveys (now The Essential 0-5 Survey)
• Five Essentials—Early Education surveys: teacher and parent surveys measuring five organizational constructs in pre-k settings

Key Sources¶

• Pacchiano, D.M., Wagner, M.R., & Lewandowski, H., with Ehrlich, S.B. & Stein, A.G. (2018). Early Education Essentials: Illustrations of Strong Organizational Practices in Programs Poised for Improvement. Chicago, IL: The Ounce of Prevention Fund and the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/early-education-essentials-illustrations-strong-organizational-practices-programs