This study sought to determine whether phase 1 early childhood classrooms receiving classroom resources and technical assistance for early childhood teachers through the Allies for Quality Care project would have greater improvements in process quality than phase 2 classrooms receiving only technical assistance. Process quality refers to what children experience in the early childhood classroom that directly impacts their development and was assessed through the Environment Rating Scales (ERS). Classroom resources were provided to improve the quality of the environment that children experience. The technical assistance was one-on-one to help early childhood teachers understand developmentally appropriate practices. The study examined whether the following variables impacted quality: accessibility of materials; field technical assistant; total number of early childhood teachers, total at pre-assessment, total at post-assessment, and same teacher at pre- to post-assessment; classroom and teacher technical assistance hours; teacher turnover; early childhood teachers’ level of education, child development credentials, position, years of experience, and race; number of children present at post-assessment; and days between pre- and post-assessment. To determine if the variables were correlated with the ERS post-assessment scores bivariate correlations were generated. While level of education, child development credentials, years of experience, race, and total number of early childhood teachers at pre-assessment had strong correlations with the post-assessment scores, further analyses of accessibility of materials, or missed accessibility, was the only extraneous variable to remain strongly associated with the dependent variable in ITERS-R classrooms. A Factorial Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to study the differences between the phases of early childhood classrooms. When findings revealed differences between the groups, another ANCOVA was used to evaluate group differences for each scale (ITERS-R for infant and toddler classrooms and ECERS-R for preschool classrooms) separately. Both phase and scale impacted the ERS post-assessment scores for the overall sample. For differences between the phases for the individual scales, no significant differences were found. However, infant and toddler classrooms that missed accessibility of materials had significantly lower ERS post-assessment scores than classrooms that did not miss accessibility.

In the past, educators and policy makers believed that by providing more resources they could directly improve student-learning outcomes. To their frustration, this turns out not to be entirely true. Resources may be necessary but they are not sufficient. Resources themselves are not self-enacting, that is, they do not make change inevitable. Differences in their effects depend on differences in their use. This is also true in the case of educational technologies. As developers of these technologies we need to understand how resources fit within the classroom environment as enacted and how they can be effectively used to increase student learning. I report on four case studies conducted within the context of the Scaling-Up SimCalc study. In the study, "treatment" teachers were given a set of new resources to use: a combination of curriculum, educational software, and teacher professional development. "Delayed treatment" (control) teachers were asked to use their usual curriculum. Year-one study results demonstrated by randomized controlled testing the successful use of technology in class settings; however, there was little information on how the students and teachers actually interacted with the resources. Case study classrooms were selected to examine the effects of variation of computational resource arrangements: one utilized a computer lab, two used mobile laptop carts, and one used a laptop connected to a projector. The first round coding and analysis shows that the observed classrooms varied not only in their classroom set-ups but also in how teachers and students interacted with the software, the workbooks, and with one another. The variety of resource interaction points to the robustness of the SimCalc project: students and teachers can interact with the SimCalc resources in a variety of ways and still achieve student-learning gains. However, through subsequent review and analysis of the observation data five themes emerged. These themes suggest commonalities in classrooms practices surrounding the use of resources. Two new theoretical constructs, "socio-physical resource richness" and "resource use withitness" help describe (1) physical and social arrangements of resources and (2) how teachers and students manage resource use. / Ph. D.