Exploring the effects of an evidenced-based professional development programme on teaching and learning in Chinese kindergartens

Teachers’ professional development (PD) has become a frequent response to raising the quality and impact of early childhood education and care (ECEC). However, due to the lack of rigorous PD design and evidence-based PD programmes in China, providing PD programmes to improve the quality of ECEC is considered as high cost and low return. In order to improve early childhood teachers’ instruction and children’s learning outcomes, this study adapted (both educationally and culturally) an evidence-based PD programme - the Leadership for Learning (LfL, Siraj et al., 2018; 2023) - for early childhood practitioners and evaluated its effects on classroom quality and children’s literacy, numeracy, executive function, and social-emotional skills in Shenzhen, China.
The cluster-based randomised controlled trial (RCT) design was utilised to evaluate the effects of PD on classroom quality and child development. The project involved 95 classrooms, 202 teachers and 547 children from 24 preschools, with 12 preschools in the intervention group and 12 preschools in the control group. In order to evaluate the PD effects on classroom quality, Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Extension (ECERS-E; Sylva, 2010) and Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Wellbeing (SSTEW; Siraj et al., 2015) scales were employed in the pre- and post-test. In terms of child development, the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA; Save the Children, 2011) was used to measure children’s emergent literacy, numeracy, executive function, and social-emotional skills. In addition, teachers in the intervention group completed a follow-up semi-structured questionnaire to reflect on their perceived changes and the factors that influence the PD impacts.
Regarding the impacts on classroom quality, this research employed two-level models, in which classrooms were nested within kindergartens, to test the PD effectiveness. Results of multilevel regression analysis indicated the significant effects of PD on ECERS-E (B = 1.060, p less than .001, SE = 0.103) and SSTEW (B = 0.990, p less than .001, SE = 0.146). Regarding the impacts on child development, several two-level models were constructed with children being nested within classrooms. These analyses indicated significant PD effects on emergent literacy (B = 11.057, p less than .001, SE = 3.535), emergent numeracy (B = 14.072, p less than .01, SE = 4.632) and executive functions development (B = 6.775, p less than .05, SE = 2.645), but non-significant effects on social-emotional skills (F (1, 555) = 3.285, p more than .05) as compared to the control group. The qualitative analyses indicated that teachers perceived the impacts of the PD programme on the classroom environment, teachers’ teaching and learning, children’s developed skills, and colleagues’ improvements. They attributed the impacts to the contextually-appropriate PD content, continual evaluation, regular classroom visits and feedback, kindergarten support and peer recognition.
This research indicated that the adapted LfL PD significantly accounted for improving classroom quality and child development outcomes. In addition, this research offered the first rigorous test of the cross-national adaptations of a PD programme, which can contribute to cross-cultural studies. Constructing PD programmes in terms of the “what”, “how”, and “who” framework, and integrating evidence-based elements into this framework with contextually- and culturally-appropriate adaptations could be used in future PD designs. The contributions, limitations and implications are also discussed in this thesis.

Keywords: professional development
child development outcomes
Leadership for Learning
randomised controlled trial
classroom quality
Advisor: Siraj, I
Melhuish, E