All Pre-K evaluations are conducted by the Rochester Early Childhood Assessment Partnership (RECAP), a collaboration of our local foundations (with Rochester Area Community Foundation as Co-Chair), local governments, and higher education, the Rochester City School District, Catholic Diocese of Rochester, Rochester's Child and the Children's Institute (Co-Chair). RECAP was founded in 1992, with the express purpose of using evaluations to improve the quality of our Pre-K programs. The total RECAP budget is approximately $300,000 per year. RECAP assesses all RCSD and Diocese Pre-K children, classrooms, programs, schools and overall policies for our community.
For the full RECAP Tenth Annual Report, 2006-07, visit the Children's Institute web site or go directly to link below:
Full RECAP Tenth Annual Report, 2006-07
(Note that your computer must be able to read PDF files.)
Readers will find many interesting and valuable - and readable - research reports in their research library.
For the Executive Summary of RECAP results for last year, see below:
Executive Summary
RECAP 2006-07 Tenth Annual Report Facts-at-a-Glance (see link or read below).
Facts at a Glance
This report confirms that Rochester’s programs continue to enjoy one of the highest documented
ratings of any pre-k program in the U.S. RECAP served 162 pre-k classrooms, 2,694 pupils, including 690 three-year-olds. The Tenth Annual Report contains a number of new research initiatives which are described below.
1. Pre-K Pupils:
More than 80% of the students had COR change scores above developmental expectations. We
did not see any detectable differences this year in growth or performance when comparing the
race/ethnicity groups this year. There were differences seen by gender, where girls grew above
expectations significantly more than boys.
About one child in eight – 12% of the students – presented multiple socio-emotional risk factors
at entrance into preschool in the fall of 2006. Forty-four percent of those students had their
number of risks reduced to 1 or none by the spring of 2007. Children arriving to pre-k with the
greatest needs experienced the most growth during the school year.
2. Classroom Quality:
Rochester’s 162 pre-k classrooms served by RECAP continue to be ranked among the highest
documented systems in both the U.S and Europe – a significant achievement. Eighty-four percent
of classrooms are at or above the nationally accepted benchmark of the internationally recognized
Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) score of 5.0 where the scale is
1 to 7. Fifty-five percent of the classrooms had scores of 6.0 or above this year. Rochester’s
overall ECERS-R stands at 1.7 standard deviations above the national average (96th percentile).
The total ECERS-R average score was 5.9 this year (6.0 last year). Eight out of 11 programs
showed an increase in quality this year, while 3 showed a decrease.
Teaching experience and ECERS-R: An analysis was conducted again this year to examine the
relationship between ECERS-R scores and years of RECAP teacher experience. We found that teachers with 6 or more years of experience have higher ECERS-R scores by 0.7 in total compared to the teachers with fewer than 2 years. This difference was 0.5 last year.
3. Family Childcare:
RECAP included family childcare providers for a 3rd year in 2006-07. Currently there are 14
providers participating. The FDCRS scores this year averaged 5.6, up from 5.4 last year. This
level is categorized as “Good” quality.
4. Parent Perspectives Satisfaction:
Overall, parents remain very satisfied with their children’s prekindergarten programs. 94% rated
the programs above a “B” (good), and 61% of parents rated their child’s program with an “A”
grade. There were no major differences between this year and last year.
5. Children's Health Information Survey (CHI) results:
Twenty-three percent of entering pre-k pupils still have never visited a dentist. Last year, this
percentage was 22% and two years ago it was 31%. We are witnessing very high rates of asthma,
higher than in kindergarten, with 22% of pupils’ physicians reporting asthma, and 12% of
entering pre-k pupils having been hospitalized for asthma in the past year (10% last year).
Asthma continues to be a major community health issue for our young children.
6. RECAP Research Initiative - Family Support:
For the past several years, in addition to student classroom attendance, parent attendance in a
variety of program activities was collected for RECAP programs. This year, for the third
consecutive year, we have reported on both the different types of activities and the average
frequency of how often parents become involved in their child’s program. One interesting
observation from this data is that for RECAP programs overall there was an average of 13 total
contacts recorded between parents and their program during the school year.
7. Follow-up Analysis of RECAP Students :
Again this year, RECAP compared the 2006-07 kindergarten performance of students who
participated in RECAP 2005-06 pre-k programs with students who did not attend RECAP
programs. RECAP students had significantly higher 2006-07 fall and spring kindergarten COR
scores than non-RECAP students. This finding has now repeated for 4 consecutive years.
8. Pre-K Children with Disabilities:
An analysis on pre-k students with disabilities was again completed in partnership with the
Rochester City School District’s (RCSD) Department of Research, Evaluation and Testing, and
the Department of Early Childhood Education. Among the findings was that about two-thirds of
pre-k students with disabilities are boys and that pre-k students classified with a disability
perform consistently at lower levels, as measured by the COR and T-CRS, than the general
education population. However, they often do make gains commensurate with those made by
general education students.
9. Gender Gap Data Analysis:
This year, we ran a new analysis for the purpose of determining whether certain teachers or
groups of teachers could be identified as having more of a gender gap than other teachers. If we
could identify a gender gap by teacher effect, we could then test whether specific teacher
attributes could predict a larger or smaller classroom gender gap. While we found that there were
clearly gender gap differences between teachers, we could not find any significantly related
teacher or classroom variables that could be used as predictors of these differences.
10. Measure Development - The Family Involvement Questionaire (FIQ):
In 2006-07, RECAP introduced a new parent measure, the Family Involvement Questionnaire.
The first year FIQ results for RECAP showed that the prevalent parent involvement type for
Rochester pre-k parents was “Parent Involvement at Home,” followed by “Parent-Teacher
Communication,” and then “Parent Involvement in the School” with the lowest level of
participation.
11. New York State Efforts:
RECAP adaptation by Chemung County School Readiness Project.
12. High Reliability of RECAP Measures and Statistics:
The reliability of RECAP measures not only remains high, they have achieved some of the
highest “alpha reliabilities.” Specifically, the reliability statistics for 2006-07 ranged from 0.86 to
0.94.
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