Longitudinal associations among interest, persistence, supportive parenting, and achievement in early childhood

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2013.05.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This study examines two learning behaviors – interest and persistence – reflective of child temperament between ages 1 and 5 in a low-income sample.

  • We estimate a cross-lagged model of interest, persistence and maternal supportive parenting at child ages 1, 2, and 3.

  • Maternal supportive parenting influenced interest and persistence more than the reverse.

  • Both interest and persistence at age 3 predicted academic achievement at age 5.

  • Effects of interest and persistence on achievement were additive, not interactive.

Abstract

This study investigates two facets of children's school readiness: interest in new cognitive tasks (interest) and persistence in task completion (persistence). Little attention has been paid to the early development of these learning behaviors, although they might prove susceptible to intervention even before school entry. Using data from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, a sample of low-income children (N = 1771) was followed to model bidirectional associations among interest and persistence and maternal supportive parenting between ages 1 and 3, and estimate associations between children's interest and persistence at age 3 and their academic skills at age 5. Results indicate that maternal supportive parenting influences children's interest and persistence more strongly and consistently than interest or persistence influences parenting, and that interest but not persistence transacts with parenting over time. Interest and persistence were equally predictive of children's early academic skills. Findings affirm that both interest and persistence during toddlerhood predict children's academic standing at school entry.

Section snippets

Interest, persistence, and parenting

Children's interest in new tasks and materials reflects a key facet of temperamental reactivity: the tendency to orient toward novel stimuli, a dimension of temperament called approach (Blandon et al., 2010, Derryberry and Rothbart, 1997, Rothbart et al., 2001). Temperament is believed to be amenable to socialization despite its basis in biology, according to prevailing views of temperament (Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Interest in objects and environments is evident in the first six months of life

Interest, persistence, and academic skills

Both interest and persistence should facilitate early academic competence by providing children with more opportunities to learn. However, little is known about the ability of these two behaviors, in particular, at school entry to predict later academic skills because most studies evaluate composites of learning behaviors rather than the individual behaviors themselves (McDermott et al., 2002). When interest and persistence are considered individually, there is reason to expect that persistence

Data

Data were drawn from a large sample of low-income families who enrolled in a nationwide evaluation of EHS between 1996 and 1998. EHS is a federally funded program for low-income infants and toddlers and their families designed to improve children's school readiness and their caregivers’ parenting skills. The EHS Research and Evaluation Project included families seeking enrollment at 17 programs across the country selected for their demographic, geographic, and programmatic diversity. Families (N

Descriptive statistics for key variables

Table 1 displays descriptive statistics for all key independent and dependent variables. Children's interest and persistence scores were relatively stable and normally distributed across time points with a mean of 3.5–3.8. Maternal supportiveness was also stable over time with a mean of approximately 4, indicating moderate supportiveness. Children in the analytic sample, like children from the full EHS study, scored approximately 10 points lower than national norms on all measures of academic

Discussion

Children's learning behaviors in the classroom are increasingly recognized as an index of school readiness as well as a potential target for intervention. Because some of these behaviors reflect aspects of children's temperament, and are thus visible quite early, they may be vulnerable to intervention before the age of school entry, particularly if they are responsive to changes in parenting. We investigated the development of children's interest and persistence in the first five years of life

Acknowledgments

The findings reported here are based on research conducted as part of the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project funded by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under contract to Mathematica Policy Research, Princeton, NJ, and Columbia University's National Center for Children and Families, Teachers College, in conjunction with the Early Head Start Research Consortium. The Consortium consists of representatives from

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      Prior analyses of Wave 1 data from the current longitudinal study found positive concurrent associations between the behavioral persistence measure and math achievement at 6 to 9 years of age (Chen et al., 2015). Although behavioral persistence on the puzzle box task has not otherwise been studied in relation to math achievement, another study assessed children’s persistence using a series of cognitive tasks at 3 years of age and found it to predict math achievement at 5 years (Martin et al., 2013). Self-regulatory skills can also enhance math proficiency by promoting children’s appropriate classwork/homework-related behavior and adaptive interpersonal behaviors in classrooms.

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