The WestEd-authored “Measuring the Multifaceted Nature of Infant and Toddler Care Quality” recently was published in the Early Education Development Journal.

In the article, WestEd’s Peter Mangione, Kerry Kriener-Althen, and Jennifer Marcella present the psychometric properties of the Program for Infant/Toddler Care Program Assessment Rating Scale (PITC PARS), an infant and toddler quality assessment tool.

States the Taylor & Francis Online (journal publisher) research study abstract:

  • Descriptive data on 222 center-based classrooms and family child care programs were used to examine concurrent validity, and a subsample of 101 center-based classrooms serving infants was used to examine the factor structure of this measure.
  • Examination of the bivariate correlations with other commonly used measures of infant and toddler child care quality provided evidence of concurrent validity. Factor analysis suggested that the PITC PARS measures 3 distinct yet related dimensions of global child care quality.
  • The results of this study suggest that the PITC PARS can continue to be used by practitioners for self-study. Furthermore, the PITC PARS may be an effective tool in the context of policy initiatives aimed at improving the quality of infant/toddler care programs.

Author Mangione co-directs both the Center for Child & Family Studies (CCFS) and PITC at WestEd. Fellow authors Kriener-Althen and Marcella are members of CCFS and the PITC team.