Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies: Massachusetts Family Child Care Study, 2005-2007

The Resource Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies: Massachusetts Family Child Care Study, 2005-2007
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Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies: Massachusetts Family Child Care Study, 2005-2007
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The Massachusetts Family Child Care study is a two-year evaluation, conducted by Abt Associates Inc, the Manpower Development Research Corporation (MDRC) and the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), of the impacts of the LearningGames program on providers and children in family child care. LearningGames is designed to train caregivers to stimulate children's cognitive, language, and social-emotional development through a set of 200 simple games that encourage intensive, one-on-one interactions as a platform that allows the adult to engage the child in meaningful conversation, to listen to the child and respond to the child's questions and actions, and to scaffold and build on the child's growing skills at using and understanding language. The goal of LearningGames is to increase the frequency of rich language interactions between caregivers and children due to the importance of oral language development in children's understanding of words and concepts, in their ability to become competent readers, and in their long-term academic success and of the role played by rich language stimulation in promoting children's development. This evaluation of LearningGames examines the effectiveness of the program in changing the behavior of the family child care providers and the developmental outcomes for the children who are cared for by providers trained on LearningGames. Baseline data were collected in the summer of 2005 with follow up observations taking place in the fall of 2006 and again in the winter of 2007. Of the 55 family child care provider networks in Massachusetts, 16 were sampled, resulting in 1,250 children enrolled in 353 study homes, though the study suffered a heavy overall attrition rate of 58 percent. The data are provided in four data sets, one file containing data on the providers, a baseline observations file and two annual follow ups. The provider file (2005 Provider Data), includes data on: the provider's years of experience in family child care, their reasons for working as a family child care provider, what they would change about their job, what they believe is their responsibility for the children, their educational background, their age, sex, and race, the languages that they speak at home, the languages that they speak with the children in their care, and the types of materials that they read. Due to the descriptive sensitivity of the variables, this dataset requires a signed user agreement to access. All other datasets are publically available. The observation files include data from several measures: the QUEST Caregiver Rating Scale (subset of items), the Arnett Caregiver Interaction Scale, the revised Snapshot of Activities (from the OMLIT), the Read-Aloud Profile (from the OMLIT), and the TALK.The data include: the amount of time the provider shows interest in what children say or do, whether or not the provider seems to enjoy children, the average number of activities observed, the amount of read-alouds where the provider relates the book to group activities prior to reading the book, and whether or not the provider encourages children to do activities on their own

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