How does Danish high quality day care centers sustain children’s learning outcome and how can this be measured?

This presentation will present the underlying international background and theory on high quality in day care/pre-school, point out international quality standards and how quality could be measured and compared with children’s learning in Danish early childhood day care centers.Building on the ECERS mainframe (Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale) and based on empirical and theoretical research on the Danish curriculum I and my colleagues at UCN have developed contextual and cultural fitted indicators for quality. We have developed specific environmental rating scales for communities in Denmark.In a formal study the new items and the rating scales are being tested in several communities and municipalities. Data consist of scored scales from approximately 80 day care centers and observations made by our staff. Based on the concepts of the bio-ecological systems theory (e.g. Bronfenbrenner & Morris 2006) and a culture-sensitive interactionistic perspective (e.g. Sylva et al 2010) we aim to increase our knowledge on what quality in early childhood education and care is, how it can be understood, how it can be seen, and how it can be developed and evaluated. There are still concerns about developing a separate measurement tool without having a common framework in which to site this. The problem is that we seem mostly concerned with measuring the conditions for learning without a similar concern regarding what is being taught. Acknowledging the Danish curriculum is limited we need to look further into this and how it is applied across contexts. We include a database (www.legetek.dk) consisting of scores of children´s learning measured in subscales developed upon the theory of proximal processes (Bronfenbrenner 1979; Vygotsky 1978) and practice in Danish early childhood provisions and centers. We hereby aim to develop the measurement tool to be able to capture quality in the tension between learning environment and learning outcome.