Poster #33 - Early Life Adversity and Academic Achievement: The Protective Role of Teacher-Child Relationships

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

Adversity has deleterious impacts on child development across domains (Lipscomb et. al, 2021), with recent work identifying risk and protective factors that modify this association, respectively (Scrimin et. al, 2018). Adversity exposure in childhood is negatively associated with academic achievement across time (Oeri & Roebers, 2022). Given the importance of education as one conduit by which children may exit broader contexts of risk (Lipscomb et. al, 2021), illuminating protective factors that may mitigate this association is of critical importance. Considering most children in the United States have access to a primary school teacher regardless of their level of adversity exposure, teachers may be a powerful force in protecting children from the negative impact of adversity on school achievement. Thus, the current study examined the teacher-child relationship as a potential moderator of the impact of adversity on academic achievement.
Participants (N = 250) were drawn from an ongoing longitudinal study of child development. The sample was diverse with regard to ethnicity/race (54% non-Latinx, 46% Latinx) and gender (50% male, 50% female). At age 4 (M = 4.09 years, SD = 0.25), parents reported on the child’s exposure to various biological, environmental, and relational, adversities from birth to age 4 using the Early Trauma Inventory (Bremner, Vermetten, & Mazure, 2000). Each adversity event was rated for severity on a 4-point scale. Severity scores were composited and standardized within domain, then composited across domains to indicate overall early life adversity. At age 8 (M = 8.13 years, SD = 0.27), teachers reported on the quality of their relationship with the target child using the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (n = 136; Pianta, 2001) and children completed the applied problems and letter-word subscales of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement III (N = 214; Woodcock, 1989).
A MANOVA revealed no significant main effect of gender (Wilks’ 𝝀 = .995, p = .750), ethnicity-race (Wilks’ 𝝀 = .971, p = .065), nor their interaction (Wilks’ 𝝀 = .996, p = .827). At the bivariate level, early life adversity was negatively correlated with achievement at age 8 (r= -.157, p= .024). Teacher-child closeness at age 4 was positively correlated with achievement at age 8 ( r = .262, p = .002). Linear regression analyses conducted in RStudio (Allaire, 2012) demonstrated a negative effect of early life adversity (age 0-4) on child achievement (age 8), over and above the impact of child gender and ethnicity-race. Further analyses revealed a significant moderating effect of teacher-child closeness on the impact of early life adversity on child achievement. For children who had a relatively close relationship with their preschool teacher at age 4, the impact of adversity on achievement was non-significant (see Table 1, Figure 1).
The current study illuminates teacher-child relationship quality as an important protective factor against the deleterious academic impacts of early life adversity. These findings underscore the critical importance of educators in child development and suggest that interventions aimed at enhancing teacher-child relationships may be especially important for reducing the impact of adversity on children’s academic achievement.

Authors

• Edwin Garcia, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Brianne Coulombe, University of South Carolina Aiken

• Tuppett M. Yates, University of California - Riverside