Early Emotion Knowledge and Later Academic Achievement among Children of Color from Low-Income Families

• In Event: 2-159 - Applications of Cognitive Science Research: Contributions to Education Across Levels of Analysis

Integrative Statement

A growing literature has documented associations between children’s emotion knowledge and academic achievement. Fewer studies, however, have examined longitudinal associations of early emotion knowledge with later academic achievement among children of color from low-income families. The goal of the current study was to examine whether children’s emotion knowledge measured at the end of a full-year of pre-kindergarten predicts academic achievement (reading and mathematics) at the end of kindergarten and second grade, after controlling for a number of important covariates, in a large sample of primarily black children attending pre-k programs in high-poverty urban schools. Moreover, we examined whether these relations differed for children from immigrant and US-born families, given emerging literature suggesting a protective effect of immigrant status against individual-level risk factors for later academic underachievement (e.g., Calzada et al., 2015).
Participants were students (n = 1050) enrolled in a longitudinal follow-up study of a cluster randomized controlled trial of a pre-K intervention. Of participating students, 49% were boys; 90% were black; 12% were Latino; and for the 888 children with data on immigrant status (162 missing), 68% were immigrants. At the end of Pre-K, children completed the Preschool Emotion Inventory which assesses emotion knowledge using procedures adapted from Denham (1986) and Garner, Jones, & Miner (1994). In kindergarten and second grade, children completed achievement tests in math and reading. Control covariates of interest, measured at the end of pre-K, included: direct assessment of pre-academic skills, observer-rated self-regulation skills (attention, activity level, and impulsivity), and teacher reported adaptive behaviors (social skills, adaptability, and communication). Parents reported sociodemographic characteristics at study enrollment.
Using multiple imputation methods, we estimated four linear mixed effect models (clustering at school level) for each of ten imputed data sets, and one model for each test outcome. Estimates were then pooled. Model results are shown in Figure 1, including the pooled estimates and 95% confidence ranges for each parameter estimated in the four models – one for each outcome (kindergarten math, kindergarten reading, second grade math, and second grade reading). These results suggest that early emotion knowledge predicts math and reading achievement in kindergarten and second grade and that there may be differences in the relationship of emotion knowledge and achievement scores across immigrant status. For US-born children, a one-point increase in emotion knowledge was associated with an increase of 12.7 (95% CI: 6.1, 21.0) points and 13.9 (6.3, 24.6) points on the kindergarten math and reading tests, respectively. Likewise, the math and reading associations in second grade were 17.9 (8.3, 27.3) and 12.2 (3.4, 23.4) points. For immigrant children, the estimates were 4.7 (0.4, 8.7) and 7.3 (0.9, 14.4) points for math and reading in kindergarten; and the estimates were 4.9 (-0.9, 12.5) and 4.3 (-1.6, 11.1) for math and reading in second grade. As shown in Figure 2, the slopes of the fitted regression lines appear steeper for the non-immigrant children relative to the immigrant children across the four tests.
These results have implications for understanding emotion knowledge as an important target for supporting academic success.

Authors

• Alexandra Ursache, New York University School of Medicine
  Presenting Author

• Kathleen Gouley, NYU School of Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gabriela Barajas-Gonzalez, NYU School of Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Spring Dawson-McClure, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Keith Goldfeld, NYU School of Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laurie Brotman, NYU School of Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author