The Child Development Associate Program (CDA) has been identified as a type of adult education. Adult education literature supports the idea that the prior experiential base of knowledge adult learners have may influence their success in related learning situations. The purpose of this study was to assess CDA training outcomes that might be related to trainees' prior child care experience. The majority of CDA trainees possess personal child care experience from rearing their own children. Although there are differences in role functions, the parent and teacher role maintains a common link in terms of their interactions with children when fulfilling their fundamental child care responsibilities. The overlap in child care responsibilities of the parent and teacher role takes on particular significance for assessing CDA training outcomes, since the Head Start curriculum pervades the child's total learning experience, including routine aspects of child care. With this base of commonality in mind, it seems realistic to explore CDA training outcomes through assessing beliefs regarding appropriate caregiving behaviors typical of both the parent role and teacher role. Three assessment questionnaires which tapped beliefs about adults' mastery expectations regarding child development, preferences for control strategies to achieve child compliance, and various adult communication styles indicative of children's latter intellectual development were selected from previous research. Results found significant effects for CDA training and parent status on both the control strategy and communication style assessments. Inspection of results indicated that parent status per se may not be a primary causal factor, since it is inextricably confounded with key demographic characteristics including educational achievement, amount of early childhood experience and staff position. The experiential base of knowledge inherent to these characteristics may be the more causal factor in producing the significant parent-nonparent distinction. The likely influence of these other sources of relevant experiential knowledge is congruent with this study's adult learner model of the CDA training program. Regardless, focus on beliefs about typical adult-child interactions common to both the parent role and teacher role, proved useful for assessing CDA training outcomes. CDA training was demonstrated to be effective at changing trainees' beliefs about their behaviors during typical interactions with children, in a direction congruent with CDA training goals and the professional early childhood education teacher role.
