Following the effectiveness evaluation of a model for enhancing the quality of caregiver-toddler interactions (i.e., process quality),in early childhood education and care, Thrive by Three (TB3; Buøen et al., 2021), four of the study sites, Bærum, Østensjø, Orkland, and Stjørdal, have established long term plans to support and maintain the intervention. These sites are taking active steps to support the training and implementation of TB3 at new childcare centers following the completion of the effectiveness study. Because there is not yet a national implementation team responsible for TB3, it is important to collaborate with these municipalities to study the implementation process. The rationale here is two-fold; first, to provide an external evaluation of the municipalities’ efforts, and to use their experiences to make recommendations for other TB3 implementation efforts. If a national strategy for TB3 is forthcoming, the results from this study may also inform those efforts. The results form this study should therefore have a high degree of ecological validity and help provide knowledge to improve the chances of successful implementation of TB3.
This study inhabits the middle ground between more controlled implementation research and implementation practice, therefore giving the study ecological validity. The overall aim of the study is to provide research evidence from a practice-informed perspective by using a mixed methods approach. More specifically, the proposed study has several related aims. Our first aim is to create a taxonomy of the primary implementation approaches being employed in each municipality using a short and targeted qualitative interview. Our second aim is to describe the main factors related to implementation within each of the four main sites using quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews. Our third aim is to identify and measure change in implementation factors such leadership and climate related to the different implementation strategies. Our fourth aim is to assess whether different implementation strategies are related to different levels of classroom quality measured by the Classroom asessment scoring system (CLASS).
