# **1. Introduction**

The quality of preschool education<sup>6</sup> plays an important role in early development. Research to date has shown that children who have high-quality early childhood education experiences have better cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes (Engle et al., 2011). Unfortunately, providing quality early childhood education services can be particularly challenging in poor, rural contexts – especially so in developing countries. As a result, few studies have been able to use an internationally comparable measure of quality to examine the link between quality and child development outcomes in remote, resource-constrained environments.

This study investigates the quality of early childhood education programs in 303 villages in Indonesia. We use data collected in 2013 as part of an impact evaluation of the Indonesia Early Childhood Education and Development (ECED) Project, which provides rich information on early childhood classrooms, teacher characteristics, and child development outcomes.

Indonesia offers a useful setting to explore early childhood education as the government has been highly committed to improving both access to and quality of preschools in the country (Hasan, Hyson and Chang, 2013). In 2009, the Ministry of Education and Culture established national standards for ECED quality, further emphasizing the importance of investing in highquality programs. By providing an overview of the quality of early childhood education services in poor, rural areas in Indonesia, this study will help inform policy makers whether the current national quality standards align well with desired child development outcomes.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on early childhood education quality by discussing three components of quality: observed preschool quality (focusing on the ECERS-R, an internationally comparable measure), teacher characteristics (measured using their education and experience), and structural characteristics. Section 3 provides an overview of the early childhood education policy landscape in Indonesia and the research questions in this study. Then, section 4 introduces the data and methods of the study. In section 5, we outline the empirical strategy – including approaches to correcting for measurement error. Results are presented in section 6. Section 7 introduces an alternative measure of classroom quality that is more contextspecific to Indonesia and presents the association between this alternative measure of preschool quality and children’s development. It also puts the quality of Indonesian ECED services in context – both internationally and in relation to local standards. We discuss our findings and conclude in section 8.

# **2. Literature review**

The following review of the literature discusses empirical research on the link between preschool quality and children’s early childhood developmental outcomes. We focus on three aspects of preschool quality: observed preschool quality, teacher characteristics, and other structural characteristics of early childhood programs.

# _Observed preschool quality_

Decades of research on child development have established the benefits of providing highquality early childhood programs to young children (Campbell and Ramey, 1994; NICHD, 2005). One of the most widely used observational measures of quality of early childhood classroom environments is the revised version of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-

> 6 In this paper, the terms “preschool” and “early childhood education” are used interchangeably, and refer broadly to organized, center-based early learning environments for children from the ages of 3 until they enter primary school – usually playgroups and kindergartens.

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