Cultural Considerations in Defining Classroom Quality: Ghanaian Preschool Teachers’ Agreements and Disagreements with Standards-Based Instruments

Abstract

Early childhood education (ECE) programs are expanding across sub-Saharan Africa. But the quality of these programs, and their effectiveness when implemented at scale, remains unclear. Defining quality is not simple, as learning environments are shaped by cultural values and societal sociodemographics. Framed within sociocultural theory, this study broadens understanding of ECE classroom quality by examining whether and how Ghanaian educators foster children’s development in ways that are culturally and contextually adaptive but not included in current definitions of quality, using an existing classroom observation tool as a prompt. ECE teachers and school headteachers participated in semistructured interviews and focused discussions of the most widely used standards-based observation tool—the CLASS—highlighting elements of agreements, disagreements, differences, and key features of the teacher-child relationship not captured by the tool. The findings highlight ways in which the sociocultural and educational contexts need to be considered when measuring classroom quality.