School Readiness Intervention: Socioemotional Mediators

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The primary aim of this auxiliary grant is to examine the role of socioemotional processes, especially emotion-related regulation/control processes and emotion understanding, in the effectiveness of the two interventions described in the partner grants. Two samples of high-risk, primarily Hispanic and African- American children¿2- to 3-year-olds (N = 480) and 4-year-olds (n = 560) will be participants. The main conditions in both age groups will be a control group, a condition involving training for teacher responsivity and enhancing academic skills (RT), and a condition with such training plus explicit training for fostering children's understanding of emotion, social strategies, and regulation (explicit social condition or RT-S). We propose to examine children's effortful emotion-relevant regulation (i.e., EC), reactive control (less voluntary aspects of control or the lack thereof, i.e., impulsivity, behavioral inhibition), emotion understanding, social competence (SC), expressive/receptive language, and academic engagement as mediators of the effects of the two different types of experimental inventions on children's subsequent social competence (SC will be a mediator and outcome variable), adjustment, and academic readiness/functioning (including rudimentary skills related to language, literacy, and math). Children's academic engagement and teacher-child attachment also will be examined as mediators of relations of EC and SC to academic skills. In the analyses, we will examine across-time mediational chains and bi-directional relations in regard to such mediation. The effects of the interventions on the mediators are expected to be stronger for children low in initial levels of EC or adjustment. The effects of the intervention on reactive control are expected to be through EC. To test our hypotheses, we will use a multi-method, multi-reporter.approach to the assessment of regulation and reactive control (including behavioral indices), as well as a multi-reporter assessment of academic engagement, social competence, and adjustment. Emotion understanding will be operationalized as children's abilities to identify emotions and their occurrence in various situations. Mixed model and structural equation analyses will be used to test most predictions. The findings will contribute to an understanding of the processes through which the two types of interventions can affect children's socioemotional and academic development.