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Classroom Interactions, Teacher-Child Relationships, and Children’s Early Learning in Preschool

Fri, March 22, 10:00 to 11:30am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 332

Integrative Statement

Prior research on the quality of teacher-child interactions has generally examined the average child experience in the preschool classroom (e.g., Burchinal et al., 2016). Yet, the quality of children’s relationships with teachers in the same classroom is likely to vary, and few studies have successfully considered both individual and classroom-level experiences and their combined effects on children’s early learning. In the present investigation, we examine both classroom-level teacher-child interactions and individual children’s relationships with teachers in preschool. This can provide unique insight into the ways in which interactional quality and relationships matter independently and synergistically for children’s early learning.
To address these objectives, we apply regression techniques to data for 1,500 low-income preschoolers living in a large, culturally, and linguistically diverse county during the 2016-2017 school year. The overall quality of teacher-child interactions at the classroom-level was measured with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008) and the quality of individual children’s relationships with their teachers (i.e., closeness and conflict) was measured with the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (Pianta, 2001). Children’s literacy, language, and mathematics skills were measured using four assessments from the Woodcock-Johnson-III. All models discussed below control for a rich set of child, family, teacher, and classroom covariates (for a list, see Table 1 notes) and account for the nesting of children in classrooms with clustered standard errors. Missing data were addressed with full information maximum likelihood estimation.
As can be seen in Table 1, results from our main effects analyses revealed that the quality of teacher-child interactions and teacher-child conflict in preschool were not significantly related to children’s early academic learning, with absolute effect sizes ranging from .01-.04. In contrast, children who had closer relationships with their preschool teachers demonstrated greater academic gains across three of the four dimensions of achievement (effect size = .05-.09).
Having established the main effects for the focal variables of interest, in our next set of models we tested for potential multiplicative effects. Of the eight interactions tested, four were statistically significant and one was marginally significant (see Table 1). To facilitate interpretation of these findings, we plotted the predicted outcome scores for different combinations of our predictor and moderators using standard deviation cut points. In general, these interactions suggested a similar pattern. We illustrate these findings with a plot for the interaction between closeness and quality in predicting Quantitative Concepts. As can be seen in Figure 1, these interactions suggested that, in general, children did not benefit from high quality classroom environments absent of a close (or conflict free) relationship with their teachers.
In the final presentation, we will also present results from models that consider children’s social-behavior and executive functioning as outcomes. Taken together, however, our results thus far provide some suggestive evidence that preschool attendees do not reap the maximum benefit from high quality classrooms when they have low-quality individual relationships with their teachers. Accounting for individual differences and, in particular, individual children’s relationships with their teachers, is important for understanding the benefits of preschool.

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