Measures of implementation and cost of ECE are needed for use and testing together with measures of quality to shed light on what it takes--in terms of activities, capacities, and money--to achieve high quality within a center. Implementation measures need to reflect what ECE centers are doing to educate and care for children and how they are doing it. Cost measures need to capture the way ECE centers allocate the resources they have to work with. The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) launched a new project--Assessing the Implementation and Cost of High-Quality ECE (ECE-ICHQ)--to develop measures of implementation and cost for an ECE center. The measures will inform research, policy, and practice by improving understanding of variations in what centers do to support quality, their associated costs, and how resources for ECE may be better aligned with expectations for quality. The project's goal is to create a technically sound, feasible, and useful instrument that will provide consistent, systematic measures of the implementation and costs of education and care in center-based settings that serve children from birth to age 5 ("ECE centers"). By "costs" we mean how much it costs to operate a center, including costs incurred by the center, as well as the value of in-kind contributions such as space or labor. (author abstract)