Quality of Early Childhood Care and Education in Addis Ababa: Caregiver Child Interaction, Parental Perception and Social Competence of Children (Input-Process-Output Approach)
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Date
2014-02
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Abstract
The purpose of this research was to describe and explain the contexts that shaped the caring
and educational roles of ECCE centers in transiting the preschool child to the wider culture
of school life in Addis Ababa with emphasis to the analysis of quality of care giver-child
interaction, parental perception of ECCE programs and relationships to outcome variable in
the area of social development. The theoretical discourse that shaped the research was
fusion of different theories that articulated the importance of care giver child interaction for
the holistic development of preschool children in the developmental sciences. A twenty-six
item standardized instrument was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data on the
quality of caregiver child interaction in preschool care and education centers. The overall
mean value computed for the seventy classrooms observed from the Care giver Interaction
Scale was found to be 3.29. Forty-three percent of the classrooms observed were below this
mean value indicating that care giver child interaction was below the expected level. A
significant proportion of the generalized variance in the Care giver Interaction Scale score
was accounted for by the interaction of class size and care givers experience. Findings
demonstrated that quality of care giver child interaction varied with center type, time of
observation, space, physical set up, and access to learning and stimulating materials. A
significant proportion of the variance in children’s social competence score was accounted
for by the interaction of center type by father’s educational level. Parental perception of the
role of preschool centers and quality of relationship with the centers varied across center
types, socio economic status of parents and provisions availed in the centers. Implications to
improve quality of ECCE programs in the study site are forwarded
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Input-Process-Output Approach