ASSESSMENT QUALITY CRITERIA FOR KINDERGARTENS IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF TEACHERS AND PARENTS

In the present study, a set of 50 quality criteria derived from international literature and assessment instruments was submitted to 390 parents and 78 teachers of kindergarten-aged children from Hanoi, Hue, and Can Tho city to rate the importance of these quality criteria for qualitively high early childhood education on a 7-point scale (from leve 1: unimportant to level 7: very important). The results show that all ratings by the teachers and parents scored higher than ≥ 4; (middle of the 7-point scale), which indicates that all participants gave high importance values to each of the criteria. On average, the rank oders of the teachers and parents correlated substantially with rs = .83 , indicating that the teachers and parents agreed substantially on what is most important for young children and what is less important. The fifty quality criteria were grouped in four blocks: the quality of education process, the quality of family involvement, the quality of pedagogical orientations, and the quality of education structures. Analysis of internal consistencies revealed that these four quality areas can be replicated for teachers and parents when using Vietnamese data to assess the quality of education in kindergartens, contributing to improving the quality of Vietnam’s preschool education to reach the same quality as other countries in the region and the world.