All articles

The article describes the tools used to measure preschool educational environment – the ECERS Scales (Early Childhood Environment Rating Scales). The authors address the following questions: What are the ideas of quality education underpinning the ECERS Scales, and Are they suitable to us? Is it generally acceptable to use tools developed in another country to assess education quality in your own? Does the scale measure conditions for the child’s future socialization and development at school? How does it work, what are its parameters for measuring quality? How reliable is it? Can this tool be used in different educational practices (e.g. the Montessori system, Waldorf kindergartens, etc.)? Or does it focus solely on specific program? It is noted that the fact that the ECERS scale is used in countries focused on child’s cognitive development is of great importance for Russian education, which has traditionally placed high value on “school readiness”. The authors come to the conclusion that the ECERS Scales fully meet the Federal State Educational Standard requirements and possess distinctiveness and therefore can be used to assess the quality of education in Russian preschool children. The ECERS Scales are highly promising in cross-cultural research that compares the quality of Russian and foreign pre-school education.

The issue of pre-school education quality has a long history in Russia as its system of preschool education has traditionally been in existence for a long time. On the strength of international practice the author shows that quality assessment of preschool education programs is applicable to different objects and based on different perceptions of quality. The article describes the ECERS (Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale), an integrated assessment of education quality in preschool educational establishments, in particular, its latest version – the ECERS-R Scale, which has been translated, adapted and tested in different regions of Russia. The author notes that the ECERS scales present a very interesting tool for studying the quality of preschool programs, especially in view of global comparative research since they are indisputable leaders in the amount of countries in which they are used. In addition to high reliability and validity, the Scales have a high level of quality development tools in terms of their reliance on the humanistic pedagogy of early childhood development. This experience proves to be highly beneficial in the Russian context because the Federal State Educational Standard for pre-school education introduced five educational areas which are almost identical to those on the list of subscales and indicators contained in these tools.