Abstract:
The purposes of this research were 1) to study the state and problems of an operation of internal quality assurance on operation, implementation and reporting of child care center 2) to propose guidelines for internal quality assurance of child care center. The research sample consisted of 214 child care centers for infants and toddlers under the Department of Children and Youth, Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. The total of 642 key informants comprised of 214 administrators, 214 caregivers of infants, and 214 caregivers of toddlers. The instruments used for collecting data were: a questionnaire for administrators, infant and toddler caregivers, and questions used for focus group. The data were analyzed by using frequency and percentage. The research findings were as follows: 1. The state and problems of internal quality assurance of child care center were found that 1) concerning preparation: most child care centers had no assigned role for personnel and no organized learning experience plan and the most problems were related to personnels lack of knowledge and understanding of internal quality assurance and planning. 2) concerning operation: most child care centers had no implementation of learning experience plan, no monitoring of the quality of child care management, no guidelines and no improvement in the performance and quality of child care centers and the most problems were the personnel lacked of knowledge and understanding of implementing the plans, lack of evaluation and budget for improving performance and quality of education. 3) concerning reporting: most child care centers had no working on annual self - assessment report and the most problems were child care centers lacked of knowledge providers for preparing the annual self - assessment report. 2. The proposed guidelines for internal quality assurance of child care center consist of the followings: 1) concerning preparation: should be provision for defining the framework of personnel roles, manual preparation on details of personnel responsibilities, assigned tasks in accordance with knowledge and abilities, providing for examples, guidelines for the preparation of learning experience plan for infants and toddlers. 2) concerning operation: should be provision for training in educating the plan's implementation, providing supports, supervision, monitoring and allocating for budget and facilities, provision for evaluation guidelines, arrangement of standardized assessment tools, utilization of the results from evaluation to plan for solutions, providing for knowledge learning exchange and share innovative insights with other child care centers, agencies and organizations. 3) concerning reporting: should be to provide for training to provide for training and workshops on preparing the annual self -assessment report and defining the relevant content in the report that is appropriate for the child care center context.