Taking it to scale: Evaluating the scope and reach of a community-wide initiative on early childhood (original) (raw)
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Early childhood research and practice, 2009
The early childhood program matrix in this article delineates the various requirements of nine publicly funded programs in Illinois that provide services to young children and families. The first section of the matrix addresses the design of each program and logistics, such as funding, payment, eligibility, and amount of services. The second section of the matrix addresses the ways in which the local community is involved with services and the extent to which the programs are required or encouraged to form collaborations or partnerships with other programs. The third section identifies human resource or personnel requirements. The final section addresses elements of quality assurance—expected program outcomes, assessment requirements, and child outcomes. Introduction Identifying and understanding the many components of early care and education in a state can be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. A decade ago, Gina Ruther first designed a matrix to begin to differentiate between ...
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Early childhood interventions are increasingly imbedded in larger, multi-level service delivery systems, such as Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) and home visiting initiatives. Within these systems, implementation of program-level interventions occurs and is supported at multiple levels-national, regional, state, community, implementation agency, classroom and home-and involves multiple partners and stakeholders. To ensure implementation of early childhood interventions with fidelity, implementation strategies must be aligned and coordinated across system levels. This brief discusses the importance of assessing implementation at multiple levels and suggests tools for facilitating multi-level assessment of implementation. Specifically, the brief provides two illustrative examples of early childhood interventions with cascading logic models (Metz & Bartley, 2012) that identify implementation strategies and desired outcomes at each system level to facilitate alignment and sequencing of implementation activities. In addition, the brief suggests implementation constructs to be measured at each system level, along with illustrative examples of measures. Implementation teams are discussed as a key strategy for improving and aligning implementation quality across levels, along with examples of how these teams use implementation information collected across levels. Finally, the brief describes the benefits for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers of measuring implementation at multiple system levels.