ASSESSING QUALITY CHARACTERISTICS OF CENTER-BASED EARLY-CHILDHOOD ENVIRONMENTS IN GERMANY AND PORTUGAL - A CROSS-NATIONAL-STUDY

Based on the knowledge that direct assessment of the quality of early childhood educational environments is becoming more and more important , this article deals with a coordinated adaptation of the Early Childh ood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) in Germany and Portugal. The ECER S, developed by Harms and Clifford (1980), is a complex rating scale, comprising 37 items, which is implemented to assess major quality char acteristics of early childhood classrooms and has been used quite exte nsively in the US as well as in other countries. In this article we de scribe how the scale was adapted and we report selected results of a j ointly coordinated comparative study on a sample of 103 early childhoo d classrooms in Germany and 88 in Portugal. The classrooms were classi fied according to three different types in each country, lit particula r, we report the item characteristics of the adapted versions, reliabi lities and intercorrelations of the total scale and the apriori-subsca les, and results of factor analyses. A one-way ANOVA indicates group d ifferences between the six types of classrooms which can be meaningful ly interpreted.