The Importance of Student-Teacher Relationship Quality for Children’s Self-Regulatory Skills in Early Elementary School

• In Event: What Really Matters in Early Education Classrooms? Probing Classroom-Level and Individual Supports for Child Development

Abstract

Most research predicting children’s self-regulation from classroom experiences has focused on global classroom quality, but a growing body of literature suggests that it is the quality of students’ relationships with their teachers that matters. However, it remains unclear whether individual student-teacher relationships uniquely contribute to children’s self-regulation, net of global classroom-level quality (Jones et al., 2013; Cadima et al., 2016). Importantly, the measure of global classroom quality used in most previous studies (CLASS) is designed to capture classroom quality broadly, not teachers’ use of self-regulatory supports and strategies specifically, which may explain why it is only weakly and inconsistently related to self-regulatory development. A better test of the importance of student-teacher relationships for self-regulatory development over and above classroom-level quality would include a classroom-level measure designed to capture self-regulatory supports. The current study performs this test. It further asks whether the association between student-teacher relationship quality and self-regulatory development varies at different levels of classroom-level self-regulatory support, and whether these associations persist into children’s first-grade year.

We do this using data from an ongoing longitudinal study that began following low-income families and children in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2016 when children were in preschool. During the kindergarten year, teachers completed the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (Pianta, 1992; 2001) for each study participant, which yields two subscales describing the teacher’s closeness and conflict with the child. Classroom-level self-regulatory support was observed using the Adapted Teaching Style Rating Scale (Jones et al., 2021), which yields two subscales: Classroom Structure and Management and Social and Emotional Opportunities. In the fall and spring of kindergarten and the fall of first grade, children’s self-regulation was measured using direct assessment (sum of the NIH Toolbox tests of inhibitory control and attention, Flanker Inhibitory Control and Attention Test, and cognitive flexibility, Dimensional Change Card Sort; Zelazo et al. 2013), teacher ratings (Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function; LeJeune et al., 2010), and assessor report (Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment; Smith-Donald et al., 2007). There were 724 children with complete data on classroom observations and spring teacher-child ratings in kindergarten and at least one measure of self-regulation at the spring of kindergarten. Separate OLS regression models predicted each measure of self-regulation in the spring of kindergarten from student-teacher relationship quality, classroom-level self-regulatory support, and the interaction between them, controlling for fall scores and child demographics. Models were then estimated predicting self-regulation in the fall of first grade.

Preliminary results (Table 1) suggest that student-teacher relationship quality in kindergarten predicted children’s self-regulation skills at the spring of kindergarten and again at the fall of first grade, even after controlling for children’s baseline (fall of kindergarten) self-regulatory skills and classroom-level self-regulatory support. Overall, these associations were stronger and more consistently significant for student-teacher conflict vs. closeness and for teacher-reported vs. directly assessed or assessor-rated self-regulation. Associations between student-teacher relationship quality and self-regulation did not vary by the quality of classroom-level self-regulatory support. Next steps include testing the robustness of results to alternate model specifications.

Authors

• Anna Marie Wright, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author

• Anne Martin, Georgetown University

• Sherri L Castle, University of Oklahoma

• Deborah A Phillips, Georgetown University

• Anna D. Johnson, Georgetown University