Connections between educators, teachers and children are crucial in ECEC, but how can they be quantified? Sue Osborne looks at a formal method to analyse these interactions, devised in the Netherlands and currently being explored in Australia by a team at Macquarie University.
Dutch researchers developed the Caregivers Interaction Profile Scale (CIPS) as an efficient way of assessing a caregiver’s skills while interacting with a group of children.
In their research paper Measuring the Interactive Skills of Caregivers in Child Care Centers: Development and Validation of the Caregiver Interaction Profile Scales 2014, the Dutch researchers said their aim was to develop an instrument to meet certain requirements without disrupting the work of the service too much.
Firstly, the measure should be relatively time efficient so that it can be completed by a single researcher during a single centre visit. Secondly, the measure should assess individual teachers’ skills in interacting with a group of children, considering the teacher’s ability to divide their attention and react consistently across the group.
Thirdly, the same measure should be applicable to teachers’ interactions with children across the whole age range of 0-4 years.
Fourth and finally, the measure should be theory based and supported by empirical evidence, underscoring the fact that relevant aspects of caregiver–child interaction contribute to the wellbeing and development of children. CIPS uses six measures to assess the nature of the interaction:
- Sensitive responsiveness refers to the extent to which a teacher recognises children’s individual emotional and physical needs and responds appropriately and promptly to their cues and signals.
- Respect for autonomy refers to the extent to which a teacher is non-intrusive but instead recognises and respects the validity of children’s intentionsand perspectives.
- Structuring and limit setting refers to the ability of a teacher to clearly communicate expectations toward children and structure the situation accordingly, and to set clear and consistent limits on the children’s behaviour.
- Verbal communication refers to the frequency and quality of verbal interactions between teacher and children.
- Developmental stimulation concerns the degree to which a teacher deliberately attempts to foster children’s development (eg motor skills, cognitive development and creativity).
- Fostering positive peer interactions refers to a teacher’s guidance of interactions between children in the centre.
Each of the six skills are rated on a seven-point scale based on observations of videos of teacher/child interactions.
An interaction profile is drawn up for individual teachers that may be used for education and training purposes to improve the quality of educator/child interactions.
Given the positive relationship that has been shown between ECEC quality and the developmental outcomes of children, higher scores on the CIP scales should predict higher levels of competence and fewer social-emotional problems in the children.
The Dutch researchers assessed 145 teachers from 75 groups in 47 services. In total, 698 children from 0-4-year-olds participated in this study. A total of 55 teachers worked in infant groups (0-2-year-olds; 30 groups), 56 teachers worked in preschool groups (2-4-year-olds; 29 groups), and 34 teachers worked in mixed-age groups (0-4-year-olds; 16 groups). All teachers from a selected classroom were invited to participate in the study using an active consent procedure.
Each group was visited by two trained researchers. The visit lasted from about 8am until after lunch. The interactions were recorded on video.
Three months later, the groups participating in the repeat measurement were visited by one researcher, who filmed the teachers following the same procedure that was used during the first visit. The retest visits were planned on the same day of the week as the first visit for optimal comparison. After the retest visit, the teachers also completed a questionnaire to collect individual background information.
Multilevel analysis showed that the largest part of the variance in teacher skills resided at the teacher level. This suggests that teacher behaviour is for the most part determined by individual teacher characteristics, with less influence of group and centre characteristics.
The variation between teachers was quite large, especially regarding sensitive responsiveness, respect for autonomy, and verbal communication. This implies that children may experience large differences in the quality of interactions with different teachers in one and the same group, which makes it worthwhile to measure teacher behaviour at an individual level and consider the behaviour of different teachers when rating the quality of care experienced by children in a group.
The researchers concluded that variation in quality between caregivers is important in children’s wellbeing and development.
The researchers developed a six-week video feedback training program for teachers to improve their interactive skills based on the six CIPS scales.
The researchers suggested the training could be developed so teachers could send their recording to an online forum and receive feedback on their interactions that way.