Newswise — Most American first-grade classrooms are pretty happy places to be. Children smile and enjoy working with one another and have positive interactions with their teachers, who recognize their students' cues for help and offer timely responses.
But that doesn't mean that all of the students are getting the academic content they need, according to a new study being published by two University of Virginia researchers in the March issue of The Elementary School Journal.
Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education and director of its Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, and Megan Stuhlman, a senior research scientist at the center, based their study on data collected from direct observations of 820 first-grade classrooms in nearly 700 private and public schools in 32 states.
Trained raters used scoring guidelines to assess the types and frequency of social and instructional interactions between teachers and students. For example, a teacher ignoring a student with a question would score low on "sensitivity," while a teacher who responds quickly would score high.
Based upon those observations, Pianta and Stuhlman grouped the classrooms into four major categories. Teachers who worked to both create a positive social climate and strong instructional support — 23 percent of classrooms — were given the score of "high overall quality." Twenty-eight percent of classrooms had teachers scoring just below the mean and were thus deemed "mediocre." Seventeen percent of the classrooms were "low overall quality."
The largest category in the sample, accounting for 31 percent of the classrooms, was labeled "positive emotional climate, low academic demand." Stuhlman, who earned a Ph.D. from U.Va. in 2004, explained that in these classrooms, teachers interacted warmly with the students and did not discipline with threats. However, their "low academic demand" was revealed in their tendency to not give constructive feedback — for instance, not asking students to think a little bit harder about their questions, or by making basic facts more real to students in ways that would expand their understanding of those facts.
"We found that quality, particularly instructional features of teacher behavior, was rather low across the sample," said Pianta, the study's lead investigator. "In other studies, we have demonstrated the connection between these observed teacher-child interactions and student learning gains. So what we are seeing here may influence the extent to which children can perform at standards consistent with accountability frameworks such as No Child Left Behind."
Part of a 17-year longitudinal study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, this study sought to identify factors that measure teacher quality based on the evidence in the data collected from the large classroom sample.
Interestingly, the study found that factors traditionally thought to influence quality, such as class size and teacher credentials, had little influence on classroom quality. Instead, the study found that high classroom quality is linked more strongly to teachers who are both creating a positive social climate and offering strong instructional support.
"The results of this study point to incredible variation in educational opportunities for children in our country," Pianta said. "To increase the chances that more children will receive a high-quality education, we have to provide teachers with effective and targeted support to help them promote their students' learning and understanding."
For more on Pianta's work on teacher quality, visit www.virginia.edu/vpr/CASTL.
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