Early childhood educator’s implementation readiness and intervention fidelity: Findings from a person-centered study

The study investigates how well prepared kindergarten teachers are to adopt new measures (implementation readiness) and how well they adhere to these measures in practice (intervention fidelity). The research highlights language and literacy programmes for children in Danish kindergartens. The research questions are: 1) What types of preparedness can be identified among kindergarten teachers? 2) What factors related to the kindergarten teachers and the kindergartens influence the type of readiness they have? 3) How does kindergarten teachers’ readiness influence how well they implement the measures, both in terms of the number of lessons completed and the accuracy of execution?

The study identified several types of preparedness among kindergarten teachers. Kindergarten teachers who were better prepared conducted more lessons and followed the programmes more accurately. It was also found that kindergartens with more full-time staff and more investment in further education had kindergarten teachers with higher preparedness. However, in kindergartens where a greater proportion of the staff had pedagogical education, the kindergarten teachers were often less prepared to follow the programmes. Those kindergarten teachers who were best prepared followed the programmes as they were planned, with greater accuracy.

The researchers used questionnaires to investigate how prepared kindergarten teachers were to adopt new measures, both generally and specifically for language and literacy programmes. The questionnaires were distributed before two major research projects (RCT studies) that tested language and literacy programmes in Danish kindergartens. To measure how well the kindergarten teachers completed the programmes, they filled out reports after each lesson. These reports showed how many lessons the kindergarten teachers had completed and how accurately they had followed the prescribed steps in the programmes.

Bleses, D., Willemsen, M.M., Purtell, K.M., Justice, L.M., Slot, P., Dybdal, L., & Højen, A. (2023). Early childhood educator’s implementation readiness and intervention fidelity: Findings from a person-centered study. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 63, 156–168.

Online year: 2022

Issue year: 2023

Review year: 2022