Classroom Quality and Academic School Readiness Outcomes in Head Start: The Indirect Effect of Approaches to Learning

• In Event: 34.018 - Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

In our effort to narrow the national school-readiness achievement gap we must identify teachable and malleable, domain general skills that help children succeed in the classroom and beyond it. One of these is approaches to learning. Head Start defines approaches to learning as “the skills and behaviors that children use to engage in learning” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS), 2015). Skills like persistence, sustained-focus, peer communication/collaboration, and openness to new and challenging experiences, are fundamental for children while they navigate the early childhood classroom. There is emerging evidence that approaches to learning may be inextricably intertwined with academic outcomes. For example, approaches to learning predicted gains in science school readiness (Bustamante, White, & Greenfield, 2016) and that relationship is bidirectional (Bustamante, White, & Greenfield, revised review). What we know less about, however, is how this process unfolds. In this study, we use the nationally representative FACES 2009 dataset to untangle how approaches to learning is linked to academic outcomes, accounting for quality of classroom instruction, with special attention to weather approaches to learning might mediate the effect of classroom quality on academic outcomes. Recent research suggests that approaches to learning plays a key role in the relationship between classroom quality and academic readiness. Meng (2015) showed that approaches to learning was a protective factor between low-classroom quality and reduced academic outcomes in children served by Head Start. Specifically, children with high approaches to learning did not experience the negative effects of low-classroom quality on their early literacy scores. Approaches to learning skills allow children to engage in the classroom more effectively, so they can better learn and retain academic content. However, more evidence is needed to support an intentional focus on approaches to learning as a means to boost academic school readiness. This study used a structural equation model to demonstrate an indirect effect from classroom quality to academic school readiness through approaches to learning. Specifically, classroom quality predicted gains from fall to spring in approaches to learning (B = 0.150, p = 0.047); and gains in approaches to learning in turn predicted gains in academic school readiness from fall to springs (B = 0.099, p < .001); while classroom quality did not directly predict gains in academic readiness (B = -0.006, p = .909); all controlling for maternal education and children’s race (see Page 2). These results support a broad and intentional focus on approaches to learning as a mechanism for boosting academic outcomes in children from low-income families. Interventions like the EPIC curriculum (Fantuzzo, Gadsden, & McDermott, 2011) which deliberately target approaches to learning should be more pervasive in our efforts to foster school readiness. Future, research should investigate ways to imbed approaches to learning in engaging academic content so that children can practice them in a meaningful context. Improving approaches to learning in children from low-income families could have powerful implications for narrowing the national school readiness achievement gap.

Author

• Andres Sebastian Bustamante, Temple University