The findings highlighted in this research brief suggest the following conclusions:
- The quality of children's early care and education, measured by widely used observational tools, is related to children's academic, cognitive, language, and social skills after taking background characteristics into account.
- However, the associations are modest. With some notable exceptions, the magnitude of the relationships between quality and child outcomes tended to be small by statistical standards.
- In the meta-analysis, associations were stronger for 2- and 3-year-olds than for 4-year-olds and were stronger for academic and language outcomes than for social outcomes.
- In the secondary analysis, the strength of the association between quality and child outcomes was slightly greater when the dimension of quality (for example, a measure of interactions or of the quality of instruction) was more closely aligned with the outcome examined, though this was not consistent across all the studies.
- Evidence emerged suggesting that there were larger benefits in terms of children's development when quality was in the good to high range.
- Finally, examining individual items in the ECERS and CLASS indicated that the relationship between quality and child language, academics, and social development was stronger for items focusing on interactions and instruction.