Poster #140 - Neighborhood COVID-19 impacts and Self Regulation: an exploration of students in NYC’s Pre-K system

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Preschool years constitute a critical period for children's development of emotional understanding and self-regulation, building a foundation for later social-emotional skills and school readiness (Shala, 2013). The full consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are still emerging, but recent research (Weiland et al., 2021) has revealed substantial consequences relating to health, financial hardship and school disruptions, with low-income, racial and ethnic minority, and immigrant families bearing the brunt of the impact. In addition, these same underlying structural factors leading to neighborhood disadvantage are also associated with lower levels of school readiness among children (Jeon, et al.,2014).

Hypothesis: The present study explores the association between neighborhood-level impact of COVID-19 and child self-regulation skills, one important component of school readiness. We expect students attending pre-K in hardest hit neighborhoods to have lower levels of self regulation.

Background and Methods: Participants were 612 students enrolled in New York City’s Pre-K for All programs across 83 public and community-based Pre-K programs across the five boroughs during the 2021-2022 school year (Table 1).

Self-Regulation: As part of a larger evaluation of the initiative’s professional development programming, examiners conducted a battery of assessments of student’s academic achievement. Following participation, examiners completed the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment – Assessor Report (PSRA-AR; Smith-Donald et al., 2007) an experimenter-report measure of self-regulation ability. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) on the present sample revealed appropriate fit of a three factor structure of the PSRA-AR established by Daneri et al. (2018) consisting of a) attention regulation, b) impulse control, and c) positive engagement (Table 2).

COVID-19 Neighborhood Impacts: COVID-19 data is obtained from publicly available datasets provided by NYC government data portals and matched to schools with participating children based on zip code. In preliminary analyses, we utilized a dichotomous measure of “hardest-hit” zip codes established by NYC’s Neighborhood Opportunity Network due to their higher pandemic impacts, as well as pre-existing health and socioeconomic disparities.
Results: Preliminary bivariate regressions with clustered standard errors at the school level revealed that attending pre-k in zip codes that were designated as hardest-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with significantly lower attention regulation (β = -0.14, p = 0.039), but not lower impulse control or positive engagement. Future analyses will expand upon these findings in a number of important ways. First, more nuanced measures (e.g., cases and deaths) of COVID-19 impact will be examined as predictors of child self regulation. Second, child-level and site-level covariates from forthcoming NYC DOE datasets, including children’s race and school racial/ethnic makeup will be included, as will pre-pandemic school quality (as measured by the NYC DOE collected CLASS and ECRS data). Finally, we will use structural equation modeling (SEM) to model the associations of neighborhood COVID impacts on the latent factors of attention regulation, impulse control, and positive engagement, controlling for child- and site-level covariates.

Taken together, understanding these associations can guide future efforts to support children’s school readiness, by directing resources to children in neighborhoods where the pandemic had the greatest toll.

Authors

• Helena Wippick, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Audrey McMaster, New York University

• Rachel M Abenavoli, New York University

• Pamela Morris-Perez, New York University