Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Students and Their Relationships With Teachers Over Time

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Warm, supportive, and low conflict relationships with elementary school teachers predict students’ behavioral and academic achievement (Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Hughes, Luo, Kwok, & Lloyd, 2008), and these relationships may be especially important for low-income students who are more likely to experience greater difficulties in school (Macmillan, McMorris, & Kruttschnitt, 2004). However, most studies have examined the effects of student relationships with one teacher during a single school year. Students typically experience different teachers each school year, thus forming new relationships with teachers annually. The quality of a student’s relationships with his or her teachers across school years is moderately stable in general, but can be quite variable for individual students (Jerome, Hamre, & Pianta, 2009; NICHD ECCRN, 2002). Therefore, it raises questions about the impact of changes in student-teacher relationship quality across multiple school years on student behavioral and academic development. A few studies have modeled linear trajectories of student-teacher relationship quality (Ladd & Burgess, 2001; O’Connor & McCartney, 2007), but trajectories may be largely determined by the intercept (i.e. quality of the initial student-teacher relationship), thus underestimating the effects of variability in the quality of relationships with subsequent teachers. Furthermore, the use of linear trajectories does not account for nonlinear fluctuations in student-teacher relationship quality. To address these gaps in the existing research, this study examines the variability in socioeconomically disadvantaged students’ relationships with teachers across the early elementary school years, and associations with behavioral and academic outcomes.
This longitudinal study followed 164 children from Head Start preschool, as they dispersed into over 100 different classrooms each elementary school year. In the spring of kindergarten through second grade, teachers rated the amount of closeness and conflict in their relationships with participating students in their classrooms (STRS; Pianta, 1992). Preschool and third grade teachers rated students’ aggressive-disruptive and on task behaviors. In both preschool and third grade, direct child assessments of math and literacy skills were conducted at school by trained interviewers, in a location outside of the classroom to avoid distractions.

Author

• Phyllis Lee, The Pennsylvania State University