Pauline L. Slot

Teachers’ Emotional and Behavioral Support and Preschoolers’ Self-Regulation: Relations With Social and Emotional Skills During Play

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Drawing from a Dutch sample of 113 Dutch children (M age = 37 months, SD = 3.5) from 37 early care and education classrooms (19 child care centers and 18 preschools), this study examined whether the relation between classroom emotional and behavioral support and children’s observed social integration and positive mood in a play situation depends on children’s observed behavioral self-regulation. Multilevel analyses revealed a positive association between emotional and behavioral support and children’s social integration for children low on behavioral self-regulation, but there was no such association for children high on behavioral self-regulation. Contrary to our expectations, children low on behavioral self-regulation showed more integration in the case of relatively highly supportive classrooms but not less integration in classrooms that were low in support. For children’s positive mood, a positive association with emotional and behavioral support was found, and no association was found with behavioral self-regulation. Practice or Policy: This study’s findings highlight the importance of emotionally and behaviorally supportive classroom experiences for young children’s social and emotional skills. Moreover, results hint that experts should perhaps not see children low in behavioral self-regulation as always at risk for poorer social outcomes.

Early Executive Function at Age Two Predicts Emergent Mathematics and Literacy at Age Five

Previous work has shown that individual differences in executive function (EF) are predictive of academic skills in preschoolers, kindergartners, and older children. Across studies, EF is a stronger predictor of emergent mathematics than literacy. However, research on EF in children below age three is scarce, and it is currently unknown whether EF, as assessed in toddlerhood, predicts emergent academic skills a few years later. This longitudinal study investigates whether early EF, assessed at two years, predicts (emergent) academic skills, at five years. It examines, furthermore, whether early EF is a significantly stronger predictor of emergent mathematics than of emergent literacy, as has been found in previous work on older children. A sample of 552 children was assessed on various EF and EF-precursor tasks at two years. At age five, these children performed several emergent mathematics and literacy tasks. Structural Equation Modeling was used to investigate the relationships between early EF and academic skills, modeled as latent factors. Results showed that early EF at age two was a significant and relatively strong predictor of both emergent mathematics and literacy at age five, after controlling for receptive vocabulary, parental education, and home language. Predictive relations were significantly stronger for mathematics than literacy, but only when a verbal short-term memory measure was left out as an indicator to the latent early EF construct. These findings show that individual differences in emergent academic skills just prior to entry into the formal education system can be traced back to individual differences in early EF in toddlerhood. In addition, these results highlight the importance of task selection when assessing early EF as a predictor of later outcomes, and call for further studies to elucidate the mechanisms through which individual differences in early EF and precursors to EF come about.

Structural and Process Quality of Danish Preschools: Direct and Indirect Associations With Children’s Growth in Language and Preliteracy Skills

ABSTRACT Structural quality in childcare centers is considered a precondition for process quality, which in turn is related to children’s outcomes. However, the evidence on relations between structural and process quality is mixed. Moreover, despite strong theoretical claims, empirical evidence supporting the indirect relation of structural features through process quality on child outcomes is scarce. The current study contributes to the knowledge by (a) investigating the direct relations of structural teacher and classroom features with growth in children’s language and preliteracy skills in a sample of more than 3,000 children, (b) studying the associations of process quality with children’s outcomes using the widely used Classroom Assessment Scoring System Pre-K observational measure among more than 400 teachers, and (c) testing indirect effects of structural quality through process quality on growth in children’s skills. Process quality was generally directly positively associated with gains in children’s language and preliteracy skills, whereas structural quality showed few direct relations. In addition, the average level of children’s initial language and preliteracy skills were positively related to gains, as was classrooms’ proportion of non-Danish children (indirectly through process quality). The results illustrate the complexities of relations between structural and process quality and children’s outcomes and warrant further research.