The New 2023 Version of IDELA Classroom Environment Tool

The tool is designed for measurement of ECCD classroom quality, with a focus on learning environments for children ages 3.5 – 6 years. The Tool is useful in collaboration with evaluations of children’s learning and development skills through IDELA. The Tool has already been put to use and the IDELA team is collecting data from those programs to learn from the outcomes.

What Early Childhood Education domains are measured by IDELA-CE? 

IDELA-CE measures aspects of the structural and process quality at the school and classroom level framed by a developmental, socio-ecological model of the learning environment. In other words, IDELA-CE recognizes that ECE quality can be influenced by individual, school, family, community and societal factors. 

• At the individual level, the tool captures proximal aspects of the learning environment, including quality of teacher-child interactions, availability of materials and resources and elements of classroom organization that facilitate developmentally appropriate learning experiences. Using IDELA-CE conjointly with the IDELA child assessment tool allows capturing holistic information on child developmental status and how it relates with access to quality ECE.   
• At the school level, the tool measures aspects that can affect the quality of the classroom environment, including the quality of physical spaces and their suitability for use by all children, teacher qualifications, characteristics of the ECE program and the ratio of children to teachers.  
• At the family and community level, the tool captures some aspects of family engagement such as communication and collaboration with families, and community partnerships such as involvement with local organizations and resources.   
• At the societal and systems level, the tool recognizes the importance of larger contextual aspects, including, policies, funding and cultural factors in defining, promoting and sustaining ECE quality. IDELA-CE collects basic information on systems and societal level, and its customization guidelines acknowledge and address context- and culture-specific determinants of ECE quality.  

Use of IDELA-CE results  

Monitoring   

Under adequate implementation conditions, the tool allows measuring a diverse range of key performance indicators, addressing program-specific MEL data needs.  

Evaluation 

IDELA-CE has been used to measure ECE quality as part of some program evaluations (e.g. India), and as part of efforts to measure ECE quality at scale (e.g. Rwanda), with promising results. Our knowledge about the tool’s validity for evaluation purposes is still limited and gathering more evidence in this regard is one of the priorities in terms of methodological work needed on the tool. 

Real Time Learning, program improvement and teacher mentoring 

IDELA-CE results can help identify ECE areas needing improvement. For example, if data from IDELA-CE observations reveal that teachers are predominantly using rote literacy activities or relying too much in teacher-led instruction in front of the class, project staff can highlight this as part of mentoring sessions and provide relevant and actionable feedback with the teacher. This type of real time feedback can improve adherence and fidelity of the intervention and be tracked during the duration of the program in such a way that challenges and improvements are continuously monitored through a dashboard.

In Kenya, we have piloted how IDELA-CE results can be used to provide data-driven insights that can be used as part of teaching mentoring and quality improvement. This approach facilitated translating the observation results into concrete recommendations across key quality domains. This approach can be adapted for use in other contexts and the IDELA team looks forward to new opportunities to pilot it.  

In Rwanda, notably 57 Early Childhood Education (ECE) government officials from all 30 districts have already been trained on how to use the IDELA-CE Tool. Some of the trained staff have already started using the data for making decisions on district led classroom resources procurement and teacher training. The trained officials have also committed to working with their government colleagues and partner agencies to further promote the collection and use of credible data to inform education decisions especially around the quality of the classroom environment.