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