Conducting Observations at Scale: Adapting a Measure of Teacher Practice to Support Children’s SEL Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and continued experiences of racial injustice, creating supportive classroom environments and identifying practices that support children’s social and emotional development is critical. Prior research examining associations between commonly used measures of the classroom environment (e.g., CLASS; Pianta et al., 2008) tends to find only modest associations with children's outcomes (e.g., Burchinal et al., 2014). These global tools tend to focus on broad aspects of the classroom context, such as overall climate, which may not capture specific practices that drive improvement in children’s outcomes (Jones et al., 2020).

The Teaching Style Rating Scale (TSRS) addresses these limitations by capturing specific teacher practices shown to support children’s social, emotional, and behavioral development. Additionally, the TSRS has a flexible format and set of items (items form modules that can be added or dropped) making it easy to adapt and align with the targets of a particular approach (Authors, 2019).

This symposium brings together work examining the structure, reliability, validity, and feasibility of the TSRS across three contexts: Head Start classrooms, elementary schools in the Greater Boston Area, and pre-K programs in New York City. These presentations also represent a variety of interdisciplinary methods such as Generalizability Theory, factor analysis, and multilevel modeling. An expert in social and emotional development and applied research will serve as discussant.

This session aims to inform measurement of teacher practice in research and “real-world” settings at scale and to guide intervention efforts designed to support children’s social and emotional development in schools.

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chair

• Sophie Barnes, Harvard University

Discussant

• Celene Elizabeth Domitrovich, Georgetown University School of Medicine

Individual Presentations

• Assessing Teachers' Social-Emotional Practices: A Comparison of Measures that Capture Specific Social-Emotional Practices and General Teacher-Child Interactions - Presenting Author: Natalia Rojas, New York University School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Shira Kolnik Mattera, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City

• Adapting and Embedding the Teaching Style Rating Scale: Lessons From a Research-Practice Partnership to Strengthen Universal Pre-K - Presenting Author: Rachel M Abenavoli, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica Siegel, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Sophie Barnes, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Travis Cramer, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Spring Dawson-McClure, Center for Early Childhood and Development, NYU School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Vanessa Rodriguez, NYU Grossman School of Medicine; Non-Presenting Author: Laurie Brotman, NYU Langone; Non-Presenting Author: Elise Cappella, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Pamela Morris-Perez, New York University

• Getting Precise about Imprecision: Applying Generalizability Theory to the Teaching Style Rating Scale (TSRS) - Presenting Author: Sophie Barnes, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education