Practitioner Appraisals of Their Desired and Current Use of the 2014 Division for Early Childhood Recommended Practices

Abstract

A survey of 955 early childhood practitioners in one Midwestern state was conducted to assess judgments of their desired use versus their current use or implementation of 10 sets of recommended practices from the Division for Early Childhood of the Council of Exceptional Children. Practitioners from early intervention, preschool, preschool special education, Early Head Start, Head Start, and other early childhood programs participated in the study. Results indicated large effect size differences in practitioners’ judgments of their desired versus current use of the practices, differences in terms in which practices were considered most valued and most frequently used by the practitioners, and a continued gap in the use of practices compared with results reported in similar studies conducted 15 and 22 years ago, respectively. The findings are discussed in terms of the need to adopt and use effective professional development practices to ensure practitioner use of valued practices and the need to develop a comprehensive system of personnel development to provide an infrastructure to support practitioners’ knowledge and skills of recommended practices.