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Brief
Description of Figures
Take a young child at high risk of
doing poorly in the elementary school
years, put him or her in a classroom
with a great teacher, and that child
will do just as well as children who
have no such risks. This finding,
published in the September/October 2005
issue of the journal Child
Development, provides important
evidence that the quality of everyday
experiences in schools can greatly
reduce children’s academic and
social problems, even closing gaps
between children of varying
demographic, experiential and
developmental backgrounds in the early
school years.
Researchers from the University of
Virginia used data from a large,
national prospective study of children
and families to examine whether
exposing children at risk of early
school failure to high levels of
instructional and emotional support in
first grade resulted in higher
achievement and lower levels of
conflict with teachers.
A critical component of this study was
that researchers examined naturally
occurring variation in everyday
classroom interactions rather than an
intervention designed to improve
classroom interactions. Thus, their
findings have implications for every
school across the nation.
Researchers identified two groups of
at-risk children: those whose mothers
had less than a four-year college
degree and those who displayed
significant behavioral, social and/or
academic problems in kindergarten. The
at-risk groups were behind their peers
in early achievement at age 4, fell
further behind their low-risk peers by
first grade, and had higher levels of
conflict with first-grade teachers.
Yet not all children in these two
categories of early risk for school
problems displayed academic or
relational problems in first grade. If
placed in classrooms offering low
instructional quality, children whose
mothers had lower levels of education
had poorer achievement than their peers
who had more educated mothers (see
Figure 1 above).
However, in classrooms offering higher
instructional quality, children with
less-well-educated mothers achieved at
the same level as those with mothers
with a college degree. And when
children displaying difficulties in
kindergarten were placed in emotionally
supportive first-grade classrooms, they
showed achievement and adjustment
levels identical to children who had no
history of problems in kindergarten
(see Figure 2 above).
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