Families’ Experiences of a Universal Play-based Early Childhood Program in Nova Scotia: Implications for Policy and Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined families’ experiences of a publicly funded, play-based early learning program for children in the year before school entry. An online survey was conducted with parents and/or guardians (n = 291) to learn about their child’s outcomes in the program, their perception of play-based learning, attitudes toward the program, and how the program supported their family. Socio-demographic information was also collected (income, education). A concurrent triangulation mixed methods design was used in the analysis of quantitative and qualitative survey questions through descriptive and inferential statistics, followed by content analysis of open-ended responses. The majority of parents felt their child was supported by the program and would transition more easily to the first year of school as a result of participating. The results also indicate the importance of connection to school community and good communication with a child’s educators as predictors for positive attitudes toward play-based learning. Overall, the study reinforces the importance of publicly funded quality early childhood education and ensuring that parents value the play-based philosophy of these programs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".