Development Of New Qris Systems

Three studies examined the association between process quality and QRIS. Each of the three studies used a different instrument to measure process quality. The results were mixed. One found associations between QRIS and subsets of the CIS (Elicker, Langill, Ruprecht, Lewsader, & Anderson, 2011). Similarly, QRIS was positively associated with the emotional and instructional support domains of the CLASS (Sirinides, 2010). However, no associations were found between QRIS and any of the Pre-Kindergarten snapshot scales (Zellman et al., 2008). Overall, the ratings in QRIS appear to be capturing differences in structural quality, as they were designed to do. There is mixed evidence to support the notion that QRIS captures meaningful differences in process quality. Do QRIS systems lead to an increase in program quality over time? A major goal of implementing QRIS systems is to not only have a means of assessing quality, but to improve quality over time. As such, many studies have investigated the extent to which QRIS systems relate to an improvement in program quality over time. Six studies addressed this question (see Appendix B). Five of the six studies were longitudinal in nature and compared either program ratings or ERS scores over time (Zellman et al., 2008; Shen, Tackett, & Ma, 2009; Elicker et al., 2011; Tout et al., 2010; Tout et al., 2011;