The paper provides an overview of a German cohort study of newborns which includesa representative sample of about 3500 infants and their mothers. The aims, challenges,and solutions concerning the large-scale assessment of early child capacities and skillsas well as the measurements of learning environments that impact early developmen?tal progress are presented and discussed. First, a brief overview of the German regula?tions related to early child education and care (ECEC) and parental leave as well asthe study design are outlined. Then, the assessments of domain-specific and domaingeneralcognitive and socio-emotional indicators of early child functioning and devel?opment are described and the assessments of structural, orientational, and processquality of the children’s learning environment at home and in child care are presented.Special attention is given to direct assessments and their reliability and validity; in addi?tion, some selected results on social disparities are reported and the prospects of dataanalyses are discussed.
展开▼
