Quality of early child care and education: analyses at the ITERS-R indicator level

The Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale -Revised Edition (ITERS-R; Harms, Cryer, & Clifford, 2005) is being used in several countries to measure quality of classrooms for children under 50 months of age. The main goal of the present research was to study the ITERS-R alternative scoring system. With this purpose, indicators were rated beyond the quality level assigned to each item in 160 classrooms, for children between 1 and 5 years of age, in the district of Porto. Results showed that this alternative scoring system allows researchers to describe classrooms' quality with more detail and to focus also ·on the classrooms' strong points. These results can also be useful to organize intervention in order to improve quality and, thus, have a positive effect in child development