Poster #76 - The Association Between Preschool Teachers’ Attentional & Inhibitory Control and Students’ Executive Function Skills

• In Event: Poster Session 02

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that children’s executive function (EF) skills are critical for their long-term academic success, sparking interest in the many factors that may contribute to children’s EF skill development (Duncan et al., 2017, 2018; Schmitt et al., 2017, 2019). Though research has demonstrated associations between maternal EF and children’s EF (Cuevas et al., 2014) and teachers’ displays of EF and elementary students’ EF (Bardack & Obradović, 2019), there is no research to our knowledge that explores these associations in preschool contexts. Since over 50% of 3- to 5-year-old children in the USA attend preschool (de Brey et al., 2021) and EF develops rapidly during this period (Garon et al., 2008), preschool teachers may play an important role in students’ EF development. Thus, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the association between teachers’ EF-related skills and preschoolers’ EF. We predict that there will be significant associations between teachers’ Attentional Control and Inhibitory Control and students’ EF skills. If there is a significant association between teacher and preschooler EF, researchers developing EF interventions may consider including programs that promote teachers’ EF-related skills to indirectly benefit the EF skills of their students.

Data for these analyses will come from the third cohort of a longitudinal evaluation study of a statewide program designed to make high-quality preschool programs financially accessible. Teachers self-reported their EF-related skills using two scales of the Adult Temperament Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2000): Attentional Control and Inhibitory Control. Students’ EF skills were assessed in the fall and spring semesters of the preschool year using three measures: the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS; Zelazo, 2006); Day/Night Stroop Task (DNS; Carlson, 2005), and Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS; McClelland et al., 2014). We will run a series of structural equation models in Stata using Full Information Maximum Likelihood to account for missing data (StataCorp, 2021). In all models, children will be nested within classrooms and Attentional Control and Inhibitory Control will be tested separately.

In Model 1 we will evaluate the association between teachers’ EF-related skills and students’ spring EF (i.e., performance on the DCCS, DNS, and HTKS) while controlling for students’ fall scores on these assessments, family income, age, and gender (see Table 1). Model 2 will systematically assess whether these relationships are attenuated by classroom-level variables, including: (a) teacher education level; (b) number of years teacher has spent teaching preschool; (c) preschool classroom quality as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta et al., 2008); and (d) participation in the statewide preschool voucher program. These covariates will be entered into separate models due to the small number of clusters (n = 30) for estimating classroom-level effects. Finally, Model 3 will analyze the association between teachers' Attentional Control and Inhibitory Control and preschoolers’ EF skills while including the same child-level variables as in the previous models and all significant paths from Models 2a-d. This will allow us to determine whether teacher EF-related behaviors are still significantly associated with students’ EF skills after accounting for child- and classroom-level covariates.

Authors

• Kirsten Lee Anderson, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Presenting Author

• Robert Duncan, Purdue University, West Lafayette

• Jennifer Kristine Finders, Purdue University, West Lafayette

• David James Purpura, Purdue University, West Lafayette

• Sara Anne Schmitt, University of Oregon