Kindergarten classroom engagement skills : the road to academic success in elementary school
How children begin school is an important predictor of their eventual academic attainment. Although kindergarten knowledge of numbers and vocabulary represent robust indicators of children’s readiness to learn at school entry, theory and research suggest that self-directed learning skills are also important for helping children meet the challenges of the elementary school classroom. In the present thesis, three papers examine the potential benefit of targeting classroom engagement skills in terms of task-orientation and industriousness to improve children’s academic outcomes. In Paper 1, kindergarten classroom engagement skills were found to predict later academic performance and psychosocial adjustment. These results remained significant even after adjusting for kindergarten mathematics, verbal, and attention skills and established child and family risk factors. Paper 2 addresses the origins of classroom engagement and shows that early childhood cognitive control skills represent robust predictors of school entry classroom engagement skills. These findings suggest that developmental continuity in cognitive control may culminate in better school entry engagement skills. Finally in Paper 3, person-centered analyses were used to identify three subgroups of children showing low, moderate, and high patterns of engagement across elementary school. Belongingness to the low engagement trajectory was predicted by early childhood cognitive control skills and parental risk factors. Taken together these results underscore the importance of considering classroom engagement skills in school readiness assessments. This research also has implications for the development of early interventions designed to bolster school readiness in order to circumvent later academic and social impairments.
Classoom engagement Academic achievement Psychosocial adjustment Cognitive control