Featured Abstract: It's All About Interactions
Sara Mead -More evidence on the importance of teacher-child interactions to early education quality:
This study examined development of academic, language, and social skills among 4-year-olds in publicly supported prekindergarten (pre-K) programs in relation to 3 methods of measuring pre-K quality, which are as follows: (a) adherence to 9 standards of quality related to program infrastructure and design, (b) observations of the overall quality of classroom environments, and (c) observations of teachers’ emotional and instructional interactions with children in classrooms. Participants were 2,439 children enrolled in 671 pre-K classrooms in 11 states. Adjusting for prior skill levels, child and family characteristics, program characteristics, and state, teachers’ instructional interactions predicted academic and language skills and teachers’ emotional interactions predicted teacher-reported social skills. Findings suggest that policies, program development, and professional development efforts that improve teacher–child interactions can facilitate children’s school readiness.
Researchers from the National Center for Early Development and Learning used data from the SWEEP and Multi-State studies to evaluate the extent to which three different ways of measuring pre-k quality predict pre-k children's academic and social-emotional skill outcomes: program infrastructure and design features (such as teacher credentials or class size), observational measures of overall classroom environment (including safety, physical environment, and teacher behaviors), or observational measures of teacher interactions with children.
The quality of teachers' interactions (as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System) provided the best predictor of children's pre-k outcomes: Specifically, the quality of teachers' emotional interactions predicted children's social skills, and the quality of teachers' instructional interactions predicted children's academic skills. The researchers found little correlation between program design features--as measured using the NIEER quality standards--and children's outcomes. That's striking, because many states are using NIEER program quality standards as a guide for policy as they seek to improve their pre-k programs, so this study's failure to find much connection between those indicators and child outcomes could raise concerns about those efforts. Policymakers should be cautious in interpreting this finding, however, because many programs included in this study were already of relatively high quality, and the way in which NIEER benchmarks are measured (a single "yes" or "no" for each standard, regardless of how close or far the program was from that standard) may also have skewed the results away from a significant finding. More research is needed. Moreover, as policymakers seek to expand and improve the quality of pre-k programs, they must look beyond structural indicators of quality and focus on how to ensure quality in the interactions that happen between teachers and children in the classroom setting.
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