Intersecting Ecologies of Risk and Early School Adaptation

说明(申请人提供)：早年入学失败和学校适应困难会对儿童造成长期后果，包括留级、成绩不佳和辍学。教育研究人员一致认为，在儿童过渡到幼儿园的过程中，他们的表现、适应能力和能力存在异质性。社区、学校、家庭和孩子的特征相互作用，影响着过渡到幼儿园的质量，以及在学术环境中的最终成败。由于早期的学校适应往往是未来学校适应的最大预测因素，而且随着时间的推移，学校表现的早期轨迹变得越来越固定，因此，通过过渡到幼儿园的学龄前几年被认为是考察学校适应的前因的一个有影响的时间段。在这项研究中，我们建议考察社区、家庭和学校环境中影响学校适应的领域之间的交集以及儿童自身特征的重要性。利用该领域学者提出的基于生态的模型，我们建议在解释学校适应时检验风险和保护的各种组合。为了实现这一目标，我们将使用混合建模，以人和模式为中心的视角来检查风险的分布，以及风险如何组合在一起运行以产生结果。接下来，我们将把预测学校适应的传统方法与与当前学校适应理论更明确相关的混合模型进行比较。当前的理论认为，学校适应不是风险的简单线性或相加函数，而是不同领域(社区、家庭、学校和儿童特征)的风险因素同时作用的结果。使用NICHD早期儿童保育研究收集的数据，将检查学校适应并对比三个视角，线性加法模型、累积风险模型和以模式为中心的风险函数。由此产生的研究将通过测试最当代的学校适应理论，并通过测试和比较三种主要的学校适应结果模型来为这一领域做出贡献。该项目旨在了解高危环境和早期学校适应情况，以便为干预实践提供信息，并加强面临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.