William T. Gormley, Jr. and Deborah A. Phillips on looking inside the black box of early childhood education

Robert Pianta has performed a vitally important service to the field of early childhood education ("Neither Art nor Accident: New research helps define and develop quality preK and elementary teaching," HEL, January/February 2008) by developing his Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). This technique for observing preK-5 classrooms enables researchers to assess classroom quality by breaking it down into several distinct dimensions. In addition to distinguishing between instructional support and emotional support, CLASS assesses classroom management skills.

Given the growing emphasis on state-funded preK programs, CLASS provides an excellent opportunity to look inside the black box of early childhood education to see what is going on in preK classrooms. Researchers need to know this so that we can look forward to the desired outcomes that high-quality classrooms are intended to achieve and backward to the teacher characteristics that are linked to certain classroom practices.

In our own research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we have found the CLASS instrument relatively easy to learn and relatively easy to apply. It has enabled us to make comparisons between public school-based preK programs and Head Start programs within Tulsa and between Tulsa’s preK programs and school-based preK programs in other jurisdictions (see “Classroom Quality and Time Allocation in Tulsa’s Early Childhood Programs,” by Deborah Phillips, William T. Gormley, Jr., and Amy Lowenstein, 2007).

Like any other observational instrument, CLASS presents some challenges to researchers. When researchers conduct factor analysis using CLASS scores, they may generate a somewhat different set of factors than those identified by Pianta and his colleagues in other research sites. For example, with our Tulsa data, we replicated the “instructional support” and “emotional support” factors perfectly, but our third factor in effect combines the University of Virginia’s “classroom organization” and “student engagement” dimensions into one discrete dimension. Under such circumstances, researchers will need to choose between Pianta’s factors (an excellent base of comparison) and their own factors (a more authentic representation of the data). Researchers may also find it helpful to use complementary classroom observation measures, such as the Emerging Academic Snapshot technique developed by Carolee Howes and her colleagues.

If CLASS becomes more widely utilized, it could create extremely valuable opportunities beyond the world of academic research. For example, CLASS scores could contribute to school “report cards” that help public officials to choose between different pedagogical strategies and that help parents to choose between different schools.

Teaching is a craft that requires extraordinary skill, sensitivity, and imagination. Thanks to Pianta’s research, we are now able to specify how that craft plays out in classrooms all across the nation. Armed with that information, we can improve the quality of classroom experiences for relatively young children.

William T. Gormley, Jr., is professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University. Deborah A. Phillips is professor of psychology at Georgetown University.