This report summarizes findings of a literature review and research syntheses in three areas — implementation science, early care and education quality, and costs. The goal of this effort was to create a draft conceptual framework to guide development of measures for the implementation and costs of early care and education in center-based settings that serve children from birth to age 5.

The literature helped identify what is important to examine for variations in implementation and costs that can affect quality to inform the field. It also helped determine the next steps in efforts to create a technically sound, feasible, and useful instrument that will provide consistent, systematic measures of implementation and costs of high quality early care and education. (author abstract)

This report describes three potential designs for studies to assess the needs for early care and education and home visiting among American Indian and Alaska Native children and families.

For each of the three options, the report presents:

• the key research questions,
• the population of interest,
• suggested measures, and,
• potential data sources, including primary data collection or existing data sources available for secondary analysis.

The report concludes with a summary of each design and future considerations. (author abstract)

New research is needed to learn more about how, when, and why Latino parents access certain early childhood programs and services, and not others. As highlighted in this brief series, numerous existing large-scale data sets offer potentially valuable information about the ECE experiences of Hispanic populations. This brief on Latino child care search and decision-making focuses in particular on what these studies have to offer about how Hispanic families seek out and select ECE settings. Researchers can use this review and associated data tables to identify the study/studies, samples, and variables most appropriate for their research questions. (author abstract)

This document presents the proceedings from “A Working Meeting on Recent School Readiness Research: Guiding the Synthesis of Early Childhood Research,” which was held on October 21-22, 2008 in Washington, D.C. The meeting was sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) and the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE), Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Abt Associates Inc. and the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) convened the meeting.

The purposes of the meeting were to:

• Synthesize findings about impacts on children’s school readiness outcomes and teachers’ behavior emerging from a set of federally funded studies of early childhood programs, practices, interventions and curricula;and integrate new results with findings from previous research.
• Bring together early childhood research and policy experts to examine and evaluate the state of our knowledge about how to support the early development of young children, particularly those who are at-risk for poor outcomes because of poverty, and take stock of progress being made to understand how to narrow the school readiness gap. (author abstract)

This methodological report describes how selected predictors of quality can be measured using data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE). The report also provides descriptive data for each of the selected predictors of quality. The report considers attributes of early care and education settings that contribute to quality at the following levels: individual teacher and caregiver, classroom or home-based group, and center and home-based program at a single location. A companion report provides an annotated bibliography profiling key studies and professional standards supporting the inclusion of each measure discussed here as a predictor of quality. (author abstract)