Hierarchies of effective early childhood teacher dimensions as perceived by Texas directors, parents, and caregivers

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to develop a hierarchy of qualities for teachers of young children. This was accomplished by employment of two research techniques, in which participants (N = 30) were asked to complete two types of rank-ordering tasks. First, items were to be clustered together, through a free-sort technique, into mutually exclusive homogeneous groups based on a conceptual framework. Latent Partition Analysis was employed to determine the commonalities of the homogeneous groupings, with a loading factor of +.5. Four factors evolved. One quality, coordinates home/center childrearing practices and expectations, did not load onto any factor. A composite factor mean was analyzed for the construction of a Latent Factor hierarchy. Secondly, each participant was asked to group the items individually from 1 to 13. This data was analyzed by employment of the Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric analysis of variance technique, p. < .05. Item-by-item findings revealed that on 11 of the 13 items, teachers (n = 11), director (n. = 8) and parents (n = 11) had no significant differences in the 11 individual rank ordering of these qualities. In two cases, however, significant differences were identified. For the quality, encourages children to share experiences, ideas, and feelings, parents ranked the item significantly differently than did teachers and directors. The second differential was noted with the quality concerning a professional code of ethics. In this case, teachers ranked the quality significantly differently than did directors or parents. Item means were used to develop a rank hierarchy of the 13 qualities. In sum, this study has presented two distinct types of hierarchies pertaining to the qualities of early childhood teachers. Analysis of the hierarchies revealed that nurturing attributes were ranked higher than instructional competencies.