Examining the Category Functioning of the ECERS-R Across Eight Data Sets

• Published in: AERA open Vol. 4; no. 1
• Main Authors: Fujimoto, Ken A., Gordon, Rachel A., Peng, Fang, Hofer, Kerry G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.01.2018; Sage Publications Ltd; SAGE Publishing
• Subjects: Child Development; Correlation; Data Collection; Early Childhood Education; Educational Quality; Item Response Theory; Preschool Curriculum; Rating Scales; Raw Scores; child development; psychometrics; early childhood; learning environments; item response theory
• ISSN: 2332-8584; 2332-8584
• DOI: 10.1177/2332858418758299

Classroom quality measures, such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R), are widely used in research, practice, and policy. Increasingly, these uses have been for purposes not originally intended, such as contributing to consequential policy decisions. The current study adds to the recent evidence of problems with the ECERS-R standard stop-scoring by analyzing eight studies offering 14 waves of data collection in approximately 4,000 classrooms. Our analysis, which featured the nominal response model, generalized partial credit model, partial credit model, within-category averages of total scores, and point-biserial correlations, revealed that all 36 items had categories that did not follow an ordinal progression with respect to quality. Additionally, our results showed that the category problems accumulated to the scale score. The results caution against the use of the standard raw scoring and encourage development of alternative scoring methods for the ECERS-R.