Continuous Quality Improvement: Mechanisms for Strengthening ECE Program Quality and Workforce Competency

This project is funded by the Administration for Children and Families as a Child Care and Early Education Policy Research Partnership (CCEEPRP). In collaboration with the Texas Workforce Commission, the project is focused on quality improvement activities in the state’s quality rating and improvement system, known as Texas Rising Star.

This project seeks to study the variability and fidelity of implementation of continuous quality improvement plans (CQIP) in the field and to test if specific approaches to CQIP that vary in cost and intensity (enhanced director-only support or combined director-and-teacher mentoring), improve program quality and provide benefits to workforce members relative to the business-as-usual approach. CLI seeks to address the need to better understand CQI services, which were recently launched in Texas, and obtain more information about the cost-effectiveness of CQI approaches as services are scaled up to all CCDF providers in the state. Results from the four-year study will inform future CQIP initiatives and policies that aim to mature local mentoring approaches, strengthen fidelity of implementation, increase workforce competency and satisfaction, and strengthen program quality. This project will consist of two phases (Phase A and Phase B).

Phase A

Phase A will comprise of the following activities, and its findings will inform design and monitoring features applied in Phase B of the study. Phase A will be fully representative of the state as all 28 local workforce development boards will participate.

1. Explore implementation variability in Texas Rising Star CQIP delivery, receipt, and response
2. Explore the extent to which administration and mentor, school, and teacher characteristics explain implementation variability

Phase B

In Phase B, CLI will conduct a randomized control trial to investigate the benefits of varied CQIP approaches on workforce and center-based child care program outcomes. The approaches are designed to explore differences in impact and cost associated with scalable manipulations of QI structure and process features. Experimental groups include:

1. A business-as-usual control group that receives mentor managed, technology-mediated CQIP development support (TM)
2. TM plus program-level leadership coaching to support implementation of CQIP action plans (TM+PL)
3. TM+PL with added workforce or teacher-level coaching to support implementation of action plans (TM+PL+TL)

A total of 100 center-based programs will participate in this RCT study in which programs will be randomized to control/BAU, TM+PL, or TM+PL+TL. To understand effects on teachers, we will also randomly select 3 teachers per school for additional data collection. We will also a) randomly assign programs in all three groups to receive support through remote mentoring, and b) stratify group assignment by baseline Texas Rising Star-rating status.

In Year 4 of the study, we plan to engage in a series of dissemination efforts including a revised CQI implementation toolkit designed to help QRIS leaders better specify and cost their QI interventions.

CLI Faculty:

April Crawford, Ph.D., Cheryl Varghese, Ph.D., Yoonkyung Oh, PhD

Principal Investigator:

April Crawford, Ph.D.

Co-Investigator:

Cheryl Varghese, Ph.D.

Participating Sites:

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston