Day Care Quality and Child Development in Singapore

This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the effects of the day care environment on language development in 122 pre‐school children in Singapore. This study examined child progress in which pre‐ and post assessment scores and the interactive relationship between day care and family environments were taken into account. Characteristics of 16 day care centres were assessed by the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, ECERS (Harms & Clifford, 1980). This rating scale was validated against the views of early childhood experts in Singapore. Observer reliability was also obtained before assessing the centres. Day care effects were investigated by assessing children at two time points. A pretest was conducted at the beginning of the year and a post‐test administered towards the end of the year. The findings of this study indicated that the quality of day care centres as measured by the total score and specific subscales of the ECERS were related to some aspects of language development in chil...