Intersecting Ecologies of Risk and Early School Adaptation

描述（由申请人提供）：早期学业失败和学校适应困难对儿童有长期影响，包括年级保持，成绩差和辍学。教育研究者一致认为，当孩子们过渡到幼儿园时，他们的表现、适应和能力存在异质性。社区，学校，家庭和儿童的特点相互作用，影响过渡到幼儿园的质量和最终的成功或失败的学术环境。由于早期学校适应往往是最大的预测，后来的学校适应，因为早期轨迹在学校的表现变得越来越固定随着时间的推移，学前几年过渡到幼儿园被认为是一个有影响力的时间段的前身，学校适应的检查。在这项研究中，我们建议检查的影响域之间的交集在学校适应的社区，家庭和学校环境，沿着儿童自己的特点的重要性。使用生态为基础的模型，在该领域的学者提出的，我们建议测试各种组合的风险和保护在解释学校适应。为了实现这一目标，我们将使用混合建模，以人为中心和模式为中心的视角来研究风险的分布以及风险如何组合产生结果。接下来，我们将比较传统的方法预测学校适应的混合模型，更明确地相关的学校适应的当前理论。目前的理论认为，学校适应不是一个简单的线性或添加剂的风险函数，但同时在不同的领域（社区，家庭，学校和儿童特征）的风险因素之间的相互作用。使用NICHD早期儿童保育研究收集的数据将检查学校适应和对比三个角度，线性加性模型，累积风险模型和模式为中心的风险函数。由此产生的研究将有助于测试最当代的学校适应理论，并通过测试和比较三种占主导地位的模式在学校适应的结果。该项目旨在了解高风险环境和早期学校适应，以便为干预实践提供信息，并加强有学业失败风险的儿童的学校适应。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Early school failure and difficulty in school adaptation has long-term consequences for children, including grade retention, poor achievement, and school-dropout. Education researchers agree that there is heterogeneity in children's performance, adaptation, and ability as they transition into kindergarten. Community, school, family, and child characteristics interact to influence the quality of the transition into kindergarten and ultimate success or failure in an academic setting. Because early school adaptation tends to be the greatest predictor of later school adaptation, and because early trajectories in school performance become increasingly fixed over time, the preschool years through the transition to kindergarten is recognized as an influential period of time for the examination of antecedents to school adaptation. In this study we propose to examine the intersection between domains of influence in school adaptation in the community, family, and school environment along with the importance of child's own characteristics. Using an ecological based models as forwarded by scholars in the field we propose to test various combinations of risk and protection in explaining school adaptation. To accomplish this goal we will use mixture modeling, with a person- and pattern-centered perspective to examine the distribution of risk and how risk operates in combination to produce outcomes. Next, we will contrast conventional methods of predicting school adaptation to mixture models that are more explicitly relevant to the current theories of school adaptation. Current theory suggests that school adaptation is not a simple linear or additive function of risk but an interaction among risk factors simultaneously in varied domains (community, family, school, and child characteristics). Using data collected by the NICHD Study of Early Child Care will examine school adaptation and contrast three perspectives, the linear additive model, the cumulative risk model, and the pattern-centered function of risk. The resulting research will contribute to the field by testing the most contemporary theories of school adaptation and by testing and comparing three dominant models in accounting for school adaptation outcomes. This project seeks to understand high risk contexts and early school adaptation in order to inform intervention practice and enhance school adaptation among children at risk for school failure.