Poster #48 - The Impact of Social Skills on Teacher-Child Relationship Quality for Kindergarten Children

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Educators and researchers have long recognized that teacher-child relationships (TCR) have an impact on students’ academic achievement (Buyse et al., 2009; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Koomen et al., 2012; Quin, 2017). What is less clear are the necessary child factors that may undergird a healthy relationship between teacher and child. Yet, understanding these precursors is important because teachers will modify their interactions with children based on the behaviors they perceive from them, influencing the TCR quality (McHale et al., 2003; Wu et al., 2018).

Social skills, for example, may be foundational to constructive TCR, since they are learned behaviors that enable someone to positively interact with others (Gresham et al., 2011). Furthermore, preschool and early school years are important time periods for children to learn those behaviors (Fabes et al., 2003; Fox et al., 2010). Thus, while research has established a link between TCR and academic outcomes, less research has explored the role social skills play in solidifying TCR, especially at such a young age.

To examine social skills’ role, this study utilizes data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011), which followed a nationally-representative sample of students from kindergarten through fifth grade and collected data from children, parents, and teachers (response rates 74%-89%). Our study uses data from the spring kindergarten wave (n = 11,505) and employs confirmatory factor analysis to test the factor structure of the three parenting latent variables (i.e., social skills, TCR quality, academic outcomes), followed by structural equation modeling to estimate the extent to which social skills predicts TCR quality, which in turn predicts academic outcomes.

The TCR quality latent variable incorporates the closeness and conflict measures from the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (Pianta, 2001). The social skills latent construct includes teacher and parent reports of self-control as well teacher reports of internalizing and externalizing behavior; academic outcomes incorporates ECLS-K:2011’s kindergarten reading, math, and science scores.

Figure 1 presents our latent variables as well as the coefficient values and fit indices for our confirmatory factor analysis. All factor loadings were statistically significant and the multiple fit indices indicated a close fit. Figure 2 shows the structural equation model with statistically significant path coefficients and also strong fit indices. We found that social skills predicted TCR quality; a standard deviation increase in social skills predicted a nearly one standard deviation increase in the TCR quality. Furthermore, TCR quality was positively related to academic outcomes; a one standard deviation increase in TCR quality predicted nearly a third of a standard deviation in academic outcomes.

Overall, findings suggest that a child’s social skills are predictive of high quality TCR. Next steps include running our analyses with the restricted ECLS-K:2011 dataset and exploring social skills’ role in teacher-student relationships among adolescents to see if this relationship holds beyond the early elementary school years. Such analyses can help clarify the relationship between social skills and TCR, and further build our understanding of factors that influence TCR and child development overall.

Authors

• Jeffrey Yo, University of California - Los Angeles

• Eric Burnheimer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author