The purpose of this study was to examine how childcare teacher's at private educare centers perceived the Ministry of Gender Equality's accreditation indexes of educare centers, and to seek ideal ways to improve the comprehensiveness and validity of t...
The purpose of this study was to examine how childcare teacher's at private educare centers perceived the Ministry of Gender Equality's accreditation indexes of educare centers, and to seek ideal ways to improve the comprehensiveness and validity of the accreditation system in light of the type of educare centers, their circumstances and given conditions.
The research questions were posed as follows:
1. What are the reliability and validity of the accreditation system of educare centers?
2. What are childcare teachers requirements for the accreditation indices?
3. How does the career of childcare teachers affect their perception of the accreditation indices?
The subjects in this study were childcare teachers who worked at private educare centers in Seoul. After a survey was conducted, the answer sheets from 308 child care teachers were analyzed with SPSS program. Statistical data on frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation were obtained, and Cronbach alpha, x2(Chi-square) test and one-way ANOVA were utilized.
The findings of the study were as below:
1. The Reliability and Validity of the Accreditation Indices
The accreditation indices were highly reliable, since their Cronbach alpha ranged from 0.88 to 0.96. As for validity, the area of safety ranked best(4.31), and cooperation with family and local community ranked lowest(3.77). Therefore, it could be concluded that the sub-standards of the Ministry of Gender Equality's accreditation system were part of valid and reliable devices to make an extensive assessment of the quality of educare centers.
2. Childcare teachers Requirements for the Accreditation Indices
1) The types of the accreditation indices and documents that were interrelated should be incorporated. As it's feared that the complicated procedure of that system might exert an adverse influence on childcare teachers workload and the quality of educare, they demanded that interrelated items be integrated, and they also called for more detailed indices that could make a precise evaluation of childcare teacher quality on which the quality of educare depended.
2) Childcare teacher should have a full-fledged expertise and better treatment should be given to them. More extended opportunities should be provided for them to receive reeducation. It's pointed out that private centers fell behind national and public centers in terms of teacher treatment, and childcare teachers who work at accredited private centers with improved environments should be treated in the same way as national and public center child care teachers.
3) There's something wrong with the uniform application of the accreditation indexes. Child care centers are different from one another in capacity, finance and facilities, but applying the same accreditation indexes originally geared toward centers with a capacity of 21 children isn't appropriate.
4) They didn't assent to applying just a small range of marks from one to three. A wider range of scores should be put to use by giving smaller marks to imperfect or extremely inadequate things or greater scores to excellent things.
5) Every accreditation item was currently of objective type, but the use of subjective-type items was recommended because the character- istics of educare centers and local community and parent needs varied.
6) Field observers should be qualified and professional. They called on evaluators to be competent and make an assessment in a fair and objective manner.
3. As to the impacts of their career on their view of the accreditation indexes, their career made little differences to that. This finding seemed to indicate that they viewed the accreditation system and indexes favorably as a vehicle to guarantee and manage the quality of educare centers, and that they didn't disagree to the oughtness of that system.