Early Childhood Program Participation, from the National Household Education Surveys Program of 2012. First Look. NCES 2013-029
Author: Mamedova, Saida
Date: 2013-08-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Early Childhood Education,Preschool Children,Parent Attitudes,Family Involvement,Child Care,Child Care Centers,Costs,Educational Attainment,Learning Activities,Parents as Teachers,Family Income,Age Differences,Gender Differences,Racial Differences,Family Structure,Language Usage,English (Second Language),Employment Level,Geographic Location,Poverty,Adult Students

This report presents data on the early care and education arrangements and early learning of children in the United States from birth through the age of 5 who were not yet enrolled in kindergarten in the spring of 2012. The report also presents data on parents' satisfaction with various aspects of these care arrangements and on their participation in various learning activities with their children. For each category of information included in the report, the results are broken down by child, parent, and family characteristics. The data in this report are from the 2012 National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES:2012) Early Childhood Program Participation (ECPP) Survey. The ECPP survey is used to collect information on children from birth through age 6 who are not yet enrolled in kindergarten. However, 6-year-old preschoolers are atypical and too few in number to support separate estimates, and therefore they have been excluded from this report. The ECPP asks detailed questions about children's participation in relative care, nonrelative care, and center-based care arrangements. It also asks about the main reason for choosing care; what factors were important to parents when choosing a care arrangement; what activities the family does with the child, such as reading, singing, and arts and crafts; and what the child is learning, such as counting, recognizing the letters of the alphabet, and reading. Results presented in the tables within this report are weighted. All statements of comparison made in this report have been tested for statistical significance using two-tailed t-tests and are significant at the 95 percent confidence level. No adjustments were made for multiple comparisons. Some estimates that appear different may not be measurably different in a statistical sense due to sampling error. The purpose of this First Look report is to introduce new NHES survey data through the presentation of selected descriptive information. However, readers are cautioned not to draw causal inferences based on the results presented. Many of the variables examined in this report may be related to one another, but the complex interactions and relationships among them have not been explored. The variables examined here are also just a few of the variables that can be examined in these data; they were selected to demonstrate the range of information available from the study. The release of this report is intended to encourage more in-depth analysis of the data using more sophisticated statistical methods.The following are appended: (1) Technical Notes; (2) Glossary of Terms; and (3) Standard Error Tables. (Contains 15 tables.)