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Child Care Policy Research Consortium Annual Meeting

April 13-16, 2004

The Child Care Policy Research Consortium is a national alliance of research projects sponsored by the Child Care Bureau in the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Consortium's purpose is to help the Child Care Bureau increase the national capacity for sound child care research, identify and respond to critical issues, and link child care research with policy and practice.

The annual Child Care Policy Research Consortium Meeting was held on April 13-16, 2004, in Washington, DC. Materials from the conference, including summaries of sessions, PowerPoint presentations, posters and handouts are now available. To view a description of each session and relevant materials click on the links below.

Notes

  1. Most files are available in PDF format, and can be read using Acrobat Reader, a free product available from Adobe, Inc.
  2. To print large Powerpoint files, click on "print" and then select "scale to fit."
  3. Files are labelled as follows:
    • ZIP - Compressed Powerpoint files (decompress using WinZip)
    • PDF - Adobe PDF files
    • JPG - Image files in JPEG format

Contents

Plenary: Subsidy Policies and Their Effects on Families and Children (Theme I)

Plenary: Child Care Policies and Their Effects on the Workforce (Theme II)

Plenary: What Kind of Research Can Better Inform System-Level Policy Decisions?

Plenary: Child Characteristics, Environments, Well-Being, and School Readiness (Theme III)

Sessions 1-6

In Sessions 1-6 of the meeting, participants were asked to identify questions that need to be answered in order to address the larger question, What do policymakers need to know about their child care populations, services, systems, and markets in order to make informed decisions? The questions identified were then grouped to correspond generally to the three conference themes -- family, workforce, child -- and to a fourth cross-cutting category, financing and systems (click on the categories to see the questions):

Theme I: Family and Subsidy (PDF 91K)

Theme II: Workforce (PDF 83K)

Theme III: Child (PDF 103K)

Cross-Theme Category: Financing and Systems (PDF 77K)

Session 7: What do we know about the dynamics of child care selection among low-income families, especially those who use subsidies?

Session 8: How do we promote school readiness in children?

Session 9: Parents' choices and children's child care experiences among ethnic and language minority families and families whose child has a disability or special needs

Session 10: What are the issues and next steps in developing common definitions and measuring professional development, training, and experiences in formal education of the early care and education workforce?

Session 11: How do child care subsidy and TANF policies intersect to affect child care markets and outcomes for low-income families and children?

Session 12: Administrative Data: Putting it together, using it, and framing new initiatives

Session 13: How do subsidies affect employment options and outcomes for low-income families?

Session 14: Unpacking process quality: What constructs do we need for measures to get at the relationship between process quality and positive child outcomes?

Session 15: What are we learning about home-based child care -- care provided by regulated and unregulated family child care providers and by family members, friends, and neighbors who are legally exempt from regulation?

Session 16: What can we say about the effectiveness of efforts to improve child care market functioning by providing comparative information on child care facilities to parents?

Session 17: How can states improve their tracking of children's well-being? What indicators are available or needed for large-scale monitoring?

Sessions 18-20

The final three sessions addressed the following question, What should the next generation of research look like from the perspective of

  • Family needs, choices, and outcomes? -- Session 18

  • Market structure, professional development, and provider outcomes? -- Session 19

  • Children's experiences in care, their overall development, and their success in school? -- Session 20

Session 18

Session 19

Session 20

Posters

Additional files will be posted as they become available.