1
Evaluation Report: Better Kid Care Program
University of Wisconsin ExtensionBetter Kid Careprogram:
Improving the quality of Wisconsin child care
University of Wisconsin-Extension
2010
This report was authored by faculty of UW-Extension and UW-Madison:
Dave RileyKaren Ehle-Traastad
Carol OstergrenFaden Fullylove-Krause
Jenny WehmeierKathy Hetzel
Cheryl Rew StapletonMary Fran Lepeska
Nan BaumgartnerFaye Malek
Nancy CrevierPeggy Nordgren
Karen DickrellLinda Olson
Sara Weier
Improving the quality of Wisconsin child care:
University of Wisconsin-Extension’s
“Better Kid Care” program
Executive Summary
To answer the need for more staff training for Wisconsin’s child care work force, UW-Extension offices statewide have for over a decade offered the Better Kid Care program. These 2-hour sessions feature a high quality program downloaded from a satellite relay to each county Extension office, plus an hour long discussion of the topic with other local child care professionals.
In the last decade, this program has been delivered in 36 counties
- on 56 different training topics
- in 1,600 local training sessions
- to over 15,000 participants
- for free.
A study of participants found that 85% could describe specific improvements to their child care programs which they said were the result of the Better Kid Care program. These improvements were, in fact, consistent with the content and advice of programs viewed up to a half year earlier by participants.
Teachers also reported really enjoying and learning from these educational programs. “I come home with new ideas every time I attend,” reported one teacher. “The group discussion often leads to some great problem solving.”
Using a program produced at Penn State Extension, and delivered by Wisconsin’s local countyExtension offices, this program is a good example of the cost efficiencies of Extension’s county-state-national partnership. It is reaching parts of the state where other training opportunities are not readily available, and appears to be really working, leading to actual improvements in the quality of early care and education programs in Wisconsin.
In fact, the 1,600 local trainings make UW-Extension one of the main sources of continuing education for Wisconsin’s child care workforce.
University of Wisconsin-Extension1
The need for higher quality child care.
Childcare has become a normal, expectable part of early childhood for most American children. The quality of child care has a big impact on young children. At its best, early care and education (ECE) can have positive, life changing effects on young children’s futures, significantly improving their future school performance, and even preventing future problems such as criminality.1
The problem is that we do not have enough high quality ECE in Wisconsin. University of Wisconsin-Extension has conducted the only research to directly observe and rate the quality of child care classrooms across the state, and this study found only 15% to be of high quality. Most was mediocre, and about 11% was actively harmful to children’s development.2
Making the improvement of child care quality more difficult, nearly 80% of UW-Extension Family Living Educators report their counties lack sufficient professional development opportunities for child care staff. In over a third of Wisconsin Counties, this need is considered urgent.
“This is a rural county and training opportunities are a distance away.”
“I have received several calls from providers in the last week inquiring about the “Better Kid Care” program. They rely on these programs to fulfill some of their continuing education hours.”
This is the need UW-Extension is helping to answer.
UW-Extension’s response has taken four forms:
1. Policy-relevant researchfor the state. For example, Extension developed and promoted a child care quality rating system for the state,3 and has published a series of research-based reports for policy makers.4
2.Community development projects. For example, over 100 new child care programs have been started in response to our need assessment and community development 4projects, creating over 400 jobs and caring for over 7,000 children.
3. Distance education: Professional development newsletters by Extension have been distributed to child care staff statewide since 1985, in particular the Child Care Connection newsletter (distributed by the state’s ChildCareInformationCenter) and Parenting the Preschooler (distributed by Head Start agencies and others).
4. Training and support for early childhood staff. One of the key ways we have accomplished this in recent years has been through the Better Kid Care Program, offered in over 40% of Wisconsin counties five times each year.
But does the Better Kid Care program work? To answer this question, we evaluated the program in 2006 and 2009, and report the results here.
What is Better Kid Care?
The Better Kid Care Program (BKC) is a series of video-based trainings produced by the Extension Service at PennStateUniversity and downlinked to our countyExtension offices via satellite relay or viewed via Internet using streaming video. In some places, the programs are viewed live; in other places they are recorded for later viewing.
The Better Kid Care programs combine the viewing of the program with the opportunity to discuss the topic within each local group. In fact, we consider the discussions following the program to be the key time for learning, a point made by many of the participants interviewed in this study.
Meetings are usually in the evening, right after work on a weekday, and usually include some light food. Each workshop lasts two hours, including broadcast time, discussion and activities. The programs qualify as required inservice hours for Wisconsin early childhood teachers.
Approximately 1,600 BKC training programs have been conducted in Wisconsin since 1999, on 56 different topics.
For example, the topics of these programs during the
2008-2009 season included:
Science for Young Thinkers
Improving Transition
Times
What does Time
Mean to Children
I want! I Want!
I WANT! Building
Good Consumers
Art Appreciation
101 for Children
Sparking Kids Curiosity.
Evaluation Questions:
The two big questions we addressed in this evaluation were:
- How many early childhood professionals do we reach with these educational programs in a typical year? and
- Did the staff improve their programs in response to the BKC programs?
To answer these questions, Wisconsin county Extension offices were surveyed via email, during two representative years (2005-06 and 2008-09), to estimate yearlong participation rates. In a second part of the study, 11 countyExtension offices conducted telephone interviews with selected participants to find out if they had changed their practices after participating in a BKC program that year.
Numbers reached per year
In the last 10 years, UW-Extension has delivered BKC training sessions on 56 topics, averaging about 30 sites (with a peak of 36 participating counties) for each training, for a total of more than 1,600 local programs and discussion groups.
For the two years in which participation was studied, total participants averaged 1,500 per year. We estimate, therefore, a total of 15,000 participants at Wisconsin’s BKC programs in the last decade.
These numbers suggest that UW-Extension is one of the key organizations providing professional inservices to ECE staff in Wisconsin.
10 Year Tally
36 counties
56 training topics
1,600 local training programs
15,000 participants
Did the program make a difference?
Interviews were conducted with 39 early childhood staff in 11 counties (this study had prior approval of the IRB human subjects committee of UW-Extension). The interviewed staff included 6 center directors, 14 center teachers, and 19 family child care providers.
Telephone interviews were conducted, and responses were recorded verbatim. The three interview questions were:
- Thinking about the Better Kid Care programs you attended, was there anything you learned that stuck in your mind? It might be something unexpected, or useful, or even something you disagreed with.
- Can you think of anything you have done differently in your work, because of the Better Kid Care program?
- Do you have any advice for us, on how to make these programs more useful?
Using open-ended questions like these required respondents to create answers from their own memories and thinking, rather than recognizing a right answer in a questionnaire list. “Production measures” of this kind(in contrast to “recognition measures”) therefore have a built-in validity; they are delivered in the respondents’ own voice, and require more thought and commitment than is required to check a box on a questionnaire.
The staff interviewed were not selected randomly to represent average participants. Instead they were selected because they attended several BKC programs and/or seemed especially engaged as learners. For this reason, their responses probably represent exemplary impacts, not average impacts of the program.
Summary of Overall Conclusions:
Finding 1: Most participants could identify specific skills they had learned. Two months following the final program of the year, most participants (79%) described specific, useful skills or knowledge they had learned from the BKC programs.
Finding 2:Most participants (85%) also described specific improvements they had made in their early childhood programs, as a result of the BKC programs. The improvements they described were consistent with the advice in the specific BKC programs offered during the previous two years.
Finding 3: Discussion with Peers was Key. The most useful and enjoyable aspect of the programs, according to participants, is the discussion and sharing with the other care staff from the local community. Overall, in response to the question of how to improve the BKC sessions, the respondents reported the sessions are extraordinarily useful and enjoyable in their current form.
In more detail: Lessons learned and improvements made in programs.
The staff attending the BKC programs differed from one another in many ways. Some were in their first year on the job, while others had more than 30 years experience. Some worked with infants, and others with school-aged children. These very different staffs have different training needs, and therefore we are not surprised that they reported learning different things from the BKC programs.
Communication with Parents.
The final two BKC programs of the year both addressed the programs’ relationships with parents. It is no surprise, therefore, that communication with parents was the most frequently offered example of knowledge gains and program improvements. Nearly one-third of respondents (31%) described specific changes they had made in how they communicated with parents.
We developed “personality workbooks” for each child where the provider writes daily notes and shares information about what the child did, learned, said, etc., and then the parents take the books home on weekends and can add information. The journals are kept from September to September with each child and then the parents get to keep the journal.
--Family Child Care Provider, OzaukeeCounty--
Now I send out yearly contracts with updates, which I never did before. I’m keeping projects and tracking individual children’s activities to share with parents.
--Family Child Care Provider, IowaCounty--
I learned to share tid bits of something that happened each day with each parent. No matter how bad the day went, there has got to be something good that you can say to the parent. I started taking more pictures and trying to give them out to parents and write descriptions on them, so that they can see more of what’s going on during the day. Just trying to share with them more stuff. Trying to communicate better. I try to do more written stuff so that communication is extending out.
--Child Care Teacher, OutagamieCounty--
Child Guidance.
In one-quarter of the interviews (26%) the respondent reported making specific changes in how they handled child guidance and discipline issues. Different staff reported learning different things from these programs, which were from BKC programs over a half-year prior to the interview.
Some said they had learned about child guidance and the importance of reinforcing positive behaviors in young children:
I learned to compliment a child when he/she does something right, rather than just scolding when a child does something wrong.
--Center Lead Teacher, ManitowocCounty--
I can think of 3 things I do differently. First, I made my groups smaller to give more one-on-one time. Second, I try to focus more on the children behaving appropriately and less time on those acting out. And third, I really try to find and bring easier projects for the children
--Center Director, MarinetteCounty--
Four and five year-old boys are so active. The program on “How to work with Active Children” helped me understand how to use their energy. We have the children help with clean-up now. When they help to care for the facility they seem to appreciate it more.
--Center Teacher,ShawanoCounty--
Others talked about how they had learned to make transitions smoother.
I learned from the program on circle time and ways to transition. For circle time, I use a story, calendar, and a clean-up song to transition to the next thing.
--Family Child Care Provider in TaylorCounty--
OK, in like 5 minutes, I let them know we are doing this, I bring it up so they know they are going from one part of the day to the next, and it is going smoother now.
--Family Child Care Provider in DodgeCounty-
Two teachers told us the BKC programs had changed their approach to their own emotions during teacher-child conflicts, and they were now much better at keeping the situation calm.
My day-to-day approach to children is different. I am more guarded when something happens. I am more calm about situations where before I might have gotten more excited.
--Family Child Care Provider, OzaukeeCounty—
Room Layout.
About 13% of the interviewed staff reported specific changes they had made to their room layouts, based on ideas learned from the BKC program. These ideas came fromBKC programs over a half-year prior to the interview.
I’ve set up different areas for the kids to play or beby themselves. I’ve made a “quiet area” for the kids.
--Family Child Care Provider, VernonCounty--
I made a soft area and used shelves tomake another area to break up the large space. This reduced running and kids knocking over each other’s blocks.
--Center Lead Teacher, ManitowocCounty--
Emergency Preparedness.
The BKC program on Hot Topics for Directors had the fewest participants, only 51 statewide, but 8% of our respondents described knowledge gain or actual changes they had made to their programs as a result of this session. In all 3 cases, the “hot topic” was being prepared for emergencies.
We put together the emergency supplies suggested in the program and combined them with our first aid kit. We bought a large plastic tote and we store it in the basement where we would head in a storm emergency.
--Family Child Care Provider, VernonCounty--
What do participants like about the way these workshops are organized?
When we asked respondents for advice on improving the BKC sessions, by far the most common response was that they are great just as is. In particular, respondents were very happy with the amount of discussion and sharing with other, local early childhood professionals.
I liked mixing and talking with other centers and sharing ideas and opinions. Other teachers have really good ideas and I enjoyed talking to the ones who had more experience.
--Center Teacher, DodgeCounty--
I come home with new ideas every time I attend. The group discussion often leads to some great problem solving
--Family Child Care Provider, MarinetteCounty—
“Better Kid Care” programs are more interactive and therefore more useful than the technical school programs.
--Lead Teacher, TaylorCounty--
Participants also liked that the videotapes show real people in real situations, the variety of topics covered, as well as the organization of sessions:
The programs show real teachers offering suggestions on working with kids.
--Family Child Care Provider, OzaukeeCounty--
They offer topics Ican't find anywhere else.
--Family Child Care Provider, OutagamieCounty--
We borrow the tapes from the Extension Office and use them for our monthly staff training. The tapes are used as a stepping stone to topics to discuss.
--Center Director, ShawanoCounty--
How might we make the BKC sessions better?
Several useful suggestions were made for improving the BKC program. No one suggestion predominated. Ideas included:
- More time to talk as a group.
- If others wouldn’t talk during the program.
- The program should feature younger providers and providers from a wider variety of races and cultures.
- Invite parents to attend with the early childhood staff.
- Get male staff to attend more.
- Why not hold these every month?
Conclusions
- This program appears to really work, leading to actual improvements in the quality of early care and education programs in Wisconsin.
- The program is efficient, making good use of a high quality training program produced by Extension at PennStateUniversity. This is a good example of the cost-reducing efficiencies of Extension’s county-state-national partnership.
- About 1,500 child care staff, in about half of Wisconsin’s counties, receive these training programs annually. We recommend expansion of these numbers to more staff and more counties.
End Notes.