Amanda L. Roy

Neighborhood Crime and School Climate as Predictors of Elementary School Academic Quality: A Cross-Lagged Panel Analysis

AbstractPast research has found negative relationships between neighborhood structural disadvantage and students’ academic outcomes. Comparatively little work has evaluated the associations between characteristics of neighborhoods and schools themselves. This study explored the longitudinal, reciprocal relationships between neighborhood crime and school-level academic achievement within 500 urban schools. Results revealed that higher neighborhood crime (and particularly violent crime) predicted decreases in school academic achievement across time. School climate emerged as one possible mechanism within this relationship, with higher neighborhood crime predicting decreases in socioemotional learning and safety, but not academic rigor. All three dimensions of school climate were predictive of changes in academic achievement. Although this research supports a primarily unidirectional hypothesis of neighborhoods’ impacts on embedded settings, additional work is needed to understand these relationships using additional conceptualizations of neighborhood climate.

Intersections Between Nativity, Ethnic Density, and Neighborhood SES: Using an Ethnic Enclave Framework to Explore Variation in Puerto Ricans' Physical Health

Although past research has demonstrated a “health disadvantage” for Puerto Rican adults, very little is known about correlates of health among this group. Given Puerto Ricans’ unique experiences of migration and settlement, an ethnic enclave framework that integrates nativity, ethnic density, and neighborhood SES may offer insight into factors influencing Puerto Ricans’ health. This study uses a sample of 449 adult mainland- and island-born Puerto Ricans living in New York City and Chicago. The data, collected as a part of the MIDUS Survey of Minority Groups, are stratified by neighborhood ethnic density and neighborhood SES, allowing for the examination of the individual and joint influences of neighborhood characteristics on physical health. Results revealed that ethnic density and neighborhood SES were not independently or interactively related to physical health for mainland-born Puerto Ricans. However, the interaction between ethnic density and neighborhood SES was related to self-reported health, functional limitations, and health symptoms for island-born Puerto Ricans. Island-born Puerto Ricans living in ethnically dense, low SES neighborhoods reported worse health than island-born Puerto Ricans living in other types of neighborhoods. This may be a result of isolation from resources both within and outside the neighborhood.

Testing models of children's self-regulation within educational contexts: implications for measurement.

Young childrens self-regulation has increasingly been identified as an important predictor of their skills versus difficulties when navigating the social and academic worlds of early schooling. Recently, researchers have called for greater precision and more empirical rigor in defining what we mean when we measure, analyze, and interpret data on the role of childrens self-regulatory skills for their early learning (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004; Wiebe, Espy, & Charak, 2008). To address that call, this chapter summarizes our efforts to examine self-regulation in the context of early education with a clear emphasis on the need to consider the comprehensiveness and precision of measurement of self-regulation in order to best understand its role in early learning.

Struggling to Stay Afloat: Dynamic Models of Poverty-related Adversity and Child Outcomes

This chapter outlines several promising ways to capture the respective roles of poverty (as defined by falling below a federally defined threshold based on families’ total household income and family size), and co-occurring risks (such as job loss, residential, and household instability ) in research on child outcomes in the context of adversity. As high-quality longitudinal data has become increasingly available and the methods for analyzing data are more sophisticated, our approaches to the measurement of poverty-related risk have become more complex. Exposure to poverty-related risk can be understood as dynamic, with consequences for children likely to vary as a function of timing, type, and context (e.g., households, schools, and neighborhoods). The impact of poverty-related adversity may also depend on both adults’ and children’s subjective experiences of material hardship and level of disadvantage relative to neighbors or peers. The authors draw upon a preschool experiment and subsequent long-term longitudinal follow-up of over 600 low-income children (the Chicago School Readiness Project or CSRP) to illustrate these approaches.

Poverty-Related Adversity and Emotion Regulation Predict Internalizing Behavior Problems among Low-Income Children Ages 8–11

The current study examines the additive and joint roles of chronic poverty-related adversity and three candidate neurocognitive processes of emotion regulation (ER)—including: (i) attention bias to threat (ABT); (ii) accuracy of facial emotion appraisal (FEA); and (iii) negative affect (NA)—for low-income, ethnic minority children’s internalizing problems (N = 338). Children were enrolled in the current study from publicly funded preschools, with poverty-related adversity assessed at multiple time points from early to middle childhood. Field-based administration of neurocognitively-informed assessments of ABT, FEA and NA as well as parental report of internalizing symptoms were collected when children were ages 8–11, 6 years after baseline. Results suggest that chronic exposure to poverty-related adversity from early to middle childhood predicted higher levels of internalizing symptomatology when children are ages 8–11, even after controlling for initial poverty status and early internalizing symptoms in preschool. Moreover, each of the 3 hypothesized components of ER played an independent and statistically significant role in predicting children’s parent-reported internalizing symptoms at the 6-year follow-up, even after controlling for early and chronic poverty-related adversity.

Classifying Trajectories of Social–Emotional Difficulties Through Elementary School: Impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project.

Although research has shown fade-out of the cognitive benefits of classroom-based preschool interventions, less is known regarding the durability of social–emotional impacts. This study examines the extent to which the multicomponent Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) intervention lowered risk of internalizing, externalizing, attention, and social difficulties from Head Start through elementary school for 602 low-income children. Results suggest that most children in this sample showed few social–emotional difficulties over time. However, one quarter of the sample exhibited profiles of transitory or building difficulties over six years. Random assignment to the CSRP preschool intervention significantly reduced children’s odds of transitory attention and social difficulties in middle childhood, with preliminary evidence suggesting stronger impacts for children attending elementary schools characterized by low academic rigor and high neighborhood crime. CSRP was not found to be effective in preventing more robust, increasing forms of difficulty in the externalizing and attention domains. Implications for early childhood intervention and policy are discussed.

Teacher–child relationships in the context of poverty: the role of frequent school mobility

ABSTRACT Childrens relationships with their teachers are critical for classroom-based learning, but children growing up in poverty may be at risk for lower-quality relationships with teachers. Little is known about how changing schools, one poverty-related risk, affects teacher–child relationships. Using growth curve models that control for a host of other poverty-related risks, this study explores the association between children changing schools frequently (defined as three or more school moves) between preschool and third grade and the quality of their relationships with their teachers over these five years in a low-income, ethnic-minority sample. Children who frequently moved schools were reported to be less close to their teachers in third grade and experienced steeper declines in closeness than children who did not change schools frequently. Moreover, the effects of frequent school mobility at third grade were robust to other poverty-related risks, including residential mobility, parental education risk, family income, and single-parent households. Changing schools was unrelated to childrens conflict with teachers. We discuss these findings in the context of policies that support students’ transitions when changing schools.

The Roles of School Readiness and Poverty-Related Risk for 6th Grade Outcomes

Low-income students are at increased risk for grade retention and suspension, which dampens their chances of high school graduation, college attendance, and future success. Drawing from a sample of 357 children and their families who participated in the Chicago School Readiness Project, we examine whether greater exposure to cumulative poverty-related risk from preschool through 5th grade is associated with greater risk of student retention and suspension in 6th grade. Logistic regression results indicate that exposure to higher levels of cumulative risk across the elementary school years is associated with students’ increased risk of retention in 6th grade, even after controlling for child school readiness skills and other covariates. Importantly, findings of the association between average cumulative risk exposure and student suspension are more complex; the role of poverty-related risk is reduced to non-significance once early indicators of child school readiness and other covariates are included in regression models. While, children’s early externalizing behavior prior to kindergarten places children at greater risk of suspension 7 years later, children’s higher levels of internalizing behaviors and early math skills are associated with significantly decreased risk of suspension in the 6th grade. Together, findings from the study suggest the complex ways that both early school readiness and subsequent exposure to poverty-related risk may both serve as compelling predictors of children’s likelihood of “staying on track” academically in the 6th grade.