Current and preferred services of specialized professionals in childcare settings in Quebec, Canada: A descriptive survey of childcare administrators' perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Many challenges exist in promoting inclusion in childcare settings. Adequate support from specialized professionals is necessary to create inclusive childcare settings. Understanding which services are being delivered by specialized professionals in childcare contexts is an important first step. The aim of this study was to (1) describe the services currently being delivered by specialized professionals in childcare settings in Quebec (Canada) and (2) seek childcare administrators' perspectives on their preferred services. METHODS: An online province-wide descriptive survey was conducted with childcare administrators (n = 344). Questions focused on 11 service delivery dimensions (e.g. professionals involved, children served). Descriptive statistics were calculated. RESULTS: Childcare settings received services from a median of two specialized professionals (IQR [1-4]). Most services were delivered by early childhood special educators (61.3%), speech-language pathologists (57.6%), psycho-educators (43.6%) and occupational therapists (43.3%). Childcare administrators identified these four services as being particularly supportive. Professionals delivered a median of 0.4 h of service per week in each childcare setting (IQR [0.1-3.0]). A high percentage (91.2%) of administrators reported unmet needs for professional support in at least one developmental domain, with a high percentage (57.3%) of administrators identifying needs in the socio-emotional domain. Most (63.3%) expressed a desire to prioritize services for children without an established diagnosis but identified by early childhood educators as having needs for professional support. Most administrators (71.4%) also preferred in-context services. CONCLUSIONS: Childcare administrators perceive an important role for specialized professionals in supporting inclusion in their settings. Recommendations emerging are based on the four main professional service needs identified: (1) increasing the intensity and stability of services; (2) providing services for undiagnosed children identified by early childhood educators as having unmet needs; (3) ensuring that services encompassing all developmental domains with a focus on the socio-emotional domain; and (4) prioritizing of in-context services.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".