Toward an Expanded Approach to Evaluating Early Childhood Educator Professional Development

Abstract

Early childhood educator professional development promotes positive outcomes for children, but only if educators improve their practices as a result of training. Program evaluation for these professional development programs has tended to stop short of measuring and analyzing changes in teachers’ behavior. This study investigated a potential operationalization of the Cervero model for training evaluation as a framework for evaluating an early childhood professional development program at the behavior change outcome level. The Cervero model includes four classes of independent variables believed to contribute to behavior change: characteristics of the participant, characteristics of the training, characteristics of the proposed behavior change, and characteristics of the participant’s social context. It also requires an outcome measure specific to the learning objectives of the training. A review of existing literature in behavior change theory and early childhood educator professional development evaluation suggested a preliminary operationalization of the four classes of independent variables in the Cervero model for use with childcare providers in Texas. In the proposed model, participant characteristics included age, ethnicity, years of experience in the field, and the type of childcare facility in which the individual works; the training characteristic of interest was asynchronous online vs. synchronous in-person delivery; characteristics of the behavior change included performance expectancy and effort expectancy; social contextual factors included adapted measures of social influence and facilitating conditions. Using the Healthy Interactions: Promoting Lifelong Nutrition training from the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Early Childhood Educator Training Program, the author collected self-report measures of participants’ use of a set of target behaviors at baseline and approximately one month post-training. Due to the high rate of non-response, the researcher also conducted a qualitative meta-evaluation to identify strategies to better tailor data collection processes for this population. The results indicated that the training did lead to improved practices on average, provided insights to develop a revised model of change for future studies, and generated strategies evaluators can use to improve recruitment and data collection procedures for early childhood educators.