Relations between Frequency of Early Childhood Teachers’ Vocabulary Instruction and their Own Vocabulary, Executive Function, and Stress

• In Event: Understanding Early Childhood Teacher Professional Development Around Vocabulary Instruction: The Essential Role of Teacher Fidelity

Abstract

Introduction
As part of an efficacy trial, we are investigating the extent to which teachers uptake evidence-based practices within a supplemental vocabulary curriculum called Developing Talkers (DT). DT provides early childhood teachers with professional learning on facilitating language in shared book reading. Teachers receive narrative and informational texts with picture vocabulary cards designed to explicitly teach academic words.
We consider relations between teachers’ vocabulary instruction and aspects of teachers’ cognitive and emotional states. We use baseline/pre-intervention data to understand teacher factors that relate to vocabulary instruction during shared book reading. We aim to understand whether there are different teacher profiles amongst educators interested in increasing academic language instruction.

Hypotheses
We expect that teachers with stronger vocabulary knowledge and executive function skills, would provide more frequent vocabulary instruction to students. We also hypothesized that teachers experiencing more stress would provide less frequent vocabulary instruction during read-alouds.

Study population
These data are from 16 teachers who took part in the first cohort of a multi-cohort study. Before the conference, we will update our paper with second cohort data we are currently collecting from >30 more teachers. Teachers worked in a large, urban school district in kindergarten and Grade 1 classrooms. Average years of teaching experience was 10.62 (SD = 9.73) and average level of education was a bachelor’s degree.

Method
We observed teachers’ whole-class read-alouds of an unfamiliar narrative text called The Kingdom of Friends containing sophisticated vocabulary. We used the Systematic Assessment of Book Reading (SABR; Pentimonti et al., 2021) to code the number of times teachers elaborated on vocabulary words before, during, or after reading by talking about the word’s meaning or providing a formal definition. This included a frequency count of extratextual talk about words that were in the text or beyond the text but brought up during book reading. Research staff administered a set of measures to teachers. Teachers completed: measures evaluating vocabulary knowledge (Woodcock Johnson Tests of Oral Language, 2014); questionnaires evaluating teacher stress (Maslach Burnout Inventory [MBI]; Maslach et al., 2001); and the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF; Gioia et al. 2000) that includes the Behavior Regulation, Metacognition, and Global Executive indices.

Results
On average, teachers elaborated on 4 vocabulary words before reading, 10 words during reading, and 3 words after reading (Table 1). Most correlations between observed teacher behaviors in the SABR read-alouds and teachers’ cognitive and emotional factors were non-significant. However, SABR during reading vocabulary related to the MBI Metacognition Index (r = .73, p < 0.05; see Figure 1), which reflects abilities to sustain working memory, monitor success/failure in problem solving, and organize one’s materials and environment. These traits were expected to be important to total vocabulary elaborations, but interestingly was most related to during reading elaborations. Perhaps the during reading time requires higher cognitive demands to juggle reading aloud while managing students’ interests and guiding learning. Contrary to our expectations, teachers’ vocabulary knowledge and stress were not related to observed vocabulary instruction.

Authors

• Tricia A Zucker, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  Presenting Author

• Michael Mesa

• Jessica Logan, Vanderbilt University

• Michael Assel

• Yoonkyung Oh, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston