Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1007/s10643-026-02232-6

Publication Title

Early Childhood Education Journal

Volume

Advance online publication

Pages

10 pp.

Abstract

This research examined child care center directors’ perceptions of inclusion, specifically related to staff’s knowledge and skills of how to care for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with developmental delays and disabilities. They were also asked if their center’s ability to care for these children could affect performance on classroom observation measures such as those included in quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS). Two hundred forty-four directors in one southeastern state in the United States responded to a cross-sectional, electronic survey and provided the following insights: (1) staff were likely to have at least some knowledge of how to include and care for young children with delays and disabilities and (2) more than half of directors thought their program’s ability to care for young children with delays and disabilities affected their center’s performance on classroom observation measures. Implications for research, training, and child care operations are discussed, including the need for systemic changes in how child care professionals are provided training and technical assistance to facilitate high quality care for all children.

Rights

© The Authors 2026.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Original Publication Citation

Childress, D. C., Ingram, K., Maydosz, A., & Bobzien, J. L. (2026). Child care directors’ perspectives on inclusion and classroom performance on quality rating observation measures. Early Childhood Education Journal. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02232-6

ORCID

0000-0001-7160-7203 (Childress)

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