- ii. There is considerable variation in quality across types of preschool services within Indonesia. Assessed using ECERS-R, kindergartens run by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC) and playgroups established under the MoEC’s ECED project have noticeably higher quality than kindergartens run by the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MoRA) and playgroups not supported by the ECED project. When assessed using the Indonesian minimum service standards, 87 percent of project supported playgroups meet the government’s standards compared to 79 percent of MoEC or MoRA kindergartens and 69 percent of non-project supported playgroups;<sup>20</sup> and

- iii. In countries with a national early childhood education standard, using a subset of the ECERS-R items that correspond with the national standard can provide researchers with an alternative measure of classroom quality that aligns closely to the particular context.

The estimated effect sizes of observed classroom quality for four out of five EDI domains (physical health, social competence, language and cognitive development, and communication and general knowledge) suggests that observed classroom quality is a modest, reliable predictor of children’s developmental outcomes during early childhood in rural Indonesia. For the most complex model in this study (Model 6), a 1 standard deviation increase in classroom quality related to a 0.071 to 0.082 standard deviation increase in children’s developmental outcomes. This range of effect sizes appears to be within the range of other empirically rigorous studies (i.e., those that include extensive control variables and/or use fixed effects) on classroom quality of early childhood programs both in the United States and in developing countries. For example, largescale studies from the United States have effect sizes ranging from 0.04 (Duncan, 2003) to 0.18 (Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2001) on children’s language and cognitive development. For socioemotional skills, prior studies report effect sizes as small as 0.02 in the U.S. (Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2001) to as large as 0.13 in the U.K. (Sylva et al., 2006). Meanwhile, an East African study reports an effect size of 0.15 on children’s cognitive skills (Malmberg et al., 2011). A study from Ecuador, which uses CLASS instead of ECERS-R, shows similar relationships between classroom quality and children’s learning outcomes with effect sizes ranging from 0.06 to 0.13.

Compared to the few previous studies from developing countries that have examined the association between preschool quality and child development outcomes, our regression analyses introduced an extensive set of controls to adjust for potential biases that might lead to inconsistent estimates of observed classroom quality. Thus, our study confirms that even with these extensive controls (i.e., child, teacher, structural characteristics with district fixed effects), observed classroom quality is a significant and meaningful positive predictor of child development outcomes.

In addition to observed classroom quality, teacher’s education is a significant predictor of children’s social competence as well as communication and general knowledge. The effect size of teacher’s education, particularly post-secondary education, is relatively large and ranges from 0.184-0.264 standard deviations in these two EDI domains. This suggests that the Government of Indonesia’s policy to hire teachers with at least senior secondary education in early childhood education programs is supported by the results of our study.

> 20 Any apparent jump in the relative quality of various kindergartens stems from the fact that Islamic kindergartens are bunched together at the lower end of the ECERS-R spectrum. While the ECERS-R uses a score of 3 as minimum, we interpret the Indonesia standard’s minimum to be a score of 2 on the ECERS-R scale. As a result, a lot more Islamic kindergartens meet the Indonesia standards (looks more like the other types of centers) when the 58% of centers scoring a 2 are included in meeting the minimum quality level.

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