ECD Quality Checker

We are committed to solving the problem of low-quality early childhood programs.  Millions of young children around the world attend early childhood education and development (ECED) programs, and investments in ECED are growing.  Globally, we know little about the quality of these programs and have few tools to monitor and provide feedback to parents and teachers.  We propose an app that includes basic indicators of quality that can be used by childcare officials, providers and parents to monitor quality of ECED, with suggestions quality improvement.  This app will be based on critical elements that define quality ECED.   Our research on quality in ECED demonstrates that childcare providers are eager for feedback, and often feel isolated and under-supported.  Childcare officials have little time to visit many facilities.  By providing an easy way to monitor ECED quality and provide feedback to childcare providers, we will positively change the lives of children. 

We are addressing the early childhood challenge.  Science has clearly demonstrated the power of investments in early childhood development, but those investments only matter if quality is good.  Our work is global in nature, and is relevant across low, middle, and high-income countries.  Our work in sub-Saharan African countries has demonstrated that at least 80% of preprimary classrooms have no storybooks, and teachers frequently rely on rote memorization to teach even very young children.  Our research also demonstrates that teachers are often isolated and receive little training and support to improve their practices. While the context in the United States is different, the issues are similar, especially among childcare providers in rural communities and in non-English speaking communities.  Children from low-income communities are particularly at risk for receiving low-quality care.  

Our solution is focused on reaching childcare providers and teachers, administrators who need reliable data to identify strengths and challenges within ECED facilities, and parents, to help them identify which settings meet basic standards of quality.  We are primarily focused on providing useful information to teachers and childcare providers, to help them become consumers of data on their programs, and to create a way to share information on professional development with them.  But our solution also has the potential to substantially improve the efficiency and usefulness of early childhood monitoring systems, by improving the content and speed of monitoring ECED programs.  We also plan to aggregate the information that comes from monitoring, which would then help policymakers improve their planning and focus on ECED quality improvement.

Our solution is an app-based checklist that contains basic indicators of quality, which then can be used by teachers, childcare providers, monitors and parents to assess quality of ECED.  The user of the app will access the checklist of basic elements of quality.  This checklist will be aggregated and tracked over time for individual users, and will be aggregated across groups of users.  The app will have two additional components:  it will connect users, particularly childcare providers, who are interested in sharing solutions to improve quality, and it will also contain information on how to improve quality, such as ideas for engaging children with activities.  Several apps with suggestions on how to improve children’s learning are available, such as ReadyRosie, and we intend to explore possible partnerships with these groups. The app will provide feedback to childcare providers, targeted to their individual areas for improvement, with videos, and easy-to-follow guidance on how to improve their teaching quality.

The app-based checklist builds off of our research on ECED quality in low- and middle-income countries. Since 2016, we have generated evidence on associations of quality and child development and tested mostly paper-based measures to evaluate classroom quality. We plan to apply what we’ve learned to better support teachers and childcare officials to ensure that information gathered leads to quality improvements. 

Our solution is innovative because mobile apps have not yet been utilized as a tool for monitoring quality of ECD programs.  The ability to monitor quality using a simple checklist that is shared between teachers, parents and school monitors will substantially streamline and improve the process of monitoring quality, and make it more transparent.  The ability to integrate suggestions for improvement will also provide a necessary support for people caring for young children.

The technology employed will be the construction of a basic app on smartphones with a checklist to monitor quality, along with a feedback function that provides information on how to improve quality once the monitoring information is inputted.  We hope to use existing apps like WhatsApp or basic text messaging to share information with teachers, parents and early childhood professionals working in their homes and communities.  We will link providers, monitors and parents to share information on quality in ECD programs.  

We have designed quality measures and conducted studies of quality in ECD settings around the world.  Our theory of change:  If we provide more regular guidance to teachers and parents on simple elements of learning environments, like reading books, through an app or text messaging, we will increase the amount of awareness of basic indicators of quality and increase the frequency of information on quality settings.  With greater attention to these indicators, and ongoing monitoring, school monitors, teachers and parents will have a greater understanding of the quality of ECD settings, and over time, will focus investments and attention on the areas of early childhood that are most critical for young children's development, thus leading to positive changes for children.

Presently we work with country leaders and stakeholders in Liberia, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Rwanda to support their efforts in reaching early childhood providers.  We currently are reaching 20 early childhood leaders in these countries to stimulate policy-level changes to monitor and improve quality early childhood. Within one year, in the pilot phase, we hope to reach up to 500 teachers with our solution. Within five years, the app can be scaled and reach up to 10,000 teachers, and subsequently up to 100,000 children could benefit from improved early childhood care and education. 

In the next five years, we intend to promote quality in early childhood settings by providing accurate, reliable and relevant data on quality settings that is transparent and actionable.  Our goals are to increase the quality of ECD settings by empowering teachers and parents with better information on the quality of children's learning environments, by engaging teachers in the process of reporting on and collecting data on learning environments.

We face a barrier in finding partners with the technological skills to build tech-based products to address quality challenges in early childhood development.  

We hope to find some great partners to help us build tech-based solutions to promote quality in early childhood settings.

We are presently a nonprofit housed within the Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative, an umbrella organization that provides services to early childhood organizations.

We are presently a team of part-time contractors.  We have four team members with two graduate research assistants who are presently PhD students.

We have unique experience and expertise in quality measurement in early childhood development.  Our team has worked on quality measurement in many countries (Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Peru, Lesotho, Tanzania, and more recently Rwanda, Liberia and the United States).  We have a deep understanding of the needs of teachers and other early childhood professionals.  We are internationally-recognized experts in child development.  And we are innovative and creative, looking for new paths to use data to improve early childhood settings.

We presently have a partnership with USAID to build a consortium on preprimary data and measurement in sub-Saharan Africa.  We also have partnerships with several other organizations on data and measurement, including projects with the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and through the University of Nebraska. 

Our key customers are governments and organizations who are interested in addressing quality in early childhood settings.  We often work directly with governments to generate monitoring tools and other solutions for improving data on early childhood development.  Our beneficiaries are the many teachers and other ECD professionals who are working in those countries.  

Our plan is to ask governments/donors to pay for access to our app.  We will then customize it based on the country's quality standards.  Paying for this app will be more cost-effective than paying for quality measurement, which requires a substantial investment in trained observers.

We are searching for partners who can bring a new vision to early childhood measurement.