Teacher qualifications, classroom practices, family characteristics, and preschool experience: Complex effects on first graders' vocabulary and early reading outcomes
Introduction
Although many factors contribute to children's success in school, their teachers' capacity to teach effectively is among the most important (Darling-Hammond, 2000, Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002, Nye et al., 2004). Recent policies have identified teacher qualifications as an important component leading to stronger student achievement. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, see DOE, 2004a, DOE, 2004b), for example, calls for “highly qualified teachers in every classroom.” However, the research regarding the relation between teacher qualifications and child outcomes, historically, has been somewhat equivocal and any effects have been small (Coleman et al., 1966, Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002, DOE, 2002, Kanstoroom & Finn, 1999, NICHD-ECCRN, 2002a, NICHD-ECCRN, 2002b). Moreover, many studies relate teacher qualifications directly to children's outcomes and treat classroom practice like a black box. As Cohen, Raudenbush, and Ball (2003) note, providing resources, such as highly qualified teachers, is important but will not necessarily assure effective use of these resources. Rather, they propose that research give priority “to [investigating] coherent systems of instruction and… [examining] how resources are used within them” (p. 138). However, there are multiple sources of influence on children's achievement that occur outside the classroom and before children enter school. The purpose of this study is to examine the relation of teachers' qualifications to children's first-grade achievement within a larger system, including both proximal (e.g., teacher and child variables) as well as distal (e.g., SES, preschool) sources of influence on children's vocabulary and early reading skills. Hence, we examine the relation of teacher qualifications to their practice in the classroom and how, in turn, teachers' classroom practices affect children's achievement as a core system of instruction. This core system is embedded in a larger system comprised of students' language and letter–word recognition skills prior to entering first grade, their home and preschool learning environments, and their families' socioeconomic status (SES).
Section snippets
Teacher qualifications, classroom practices, and student achievement
There is accumulating research evidence that teachers' credentials, experience, and years of education may make a difference in children's achievement (Darling-Hammond, 2000, Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002). Although some argue that the process of credentialing tends to discourage more qualified persons from becoming teachers (DOE, 2002, Kanstoroom & Finn, 1999), clearly teachers' training, qualifications and experience deserve attention. Recent evidence indicates that students' achievement is
Teacher practices
Teachers differ widely in their instructional practices and interactions with their students, and these practices have been linked to student outcomes (NICHD-ECCRN, 2002a, NICHD-ECCRN, 2002b, Pianta et al., 2002). For example, research has demonstrated relations between student outcomes and classroom variables such as teacher praise, quantity and pacing of instruction, and teacher expectations (Brophy & Good, 1986, Fraser, 1987, Stockard & Mayberry, 1992). Further, teachers' abilities to manage
Language and literacy student outcomes
Vocabulary, word recognition, and phonological decoding skills were selected as the outcomes for this study because children's oral language and early reading skills are among the most important predictors of children's later school achievement (Rayner et al., 2001, Snow et al., 1998). Accumulating evidence reveals that children's letter knowledge, ability to relate the letters and words they see to the sounds they hear, and facility with phonological decoding are key skills related to reading
Child, home, preschool, and SES influences prior to first grade
Studies that examine teachers' qualifications often do not take into account child, family, and preschool characteristics, such as children's language and early reading skills, socioeconomic status (SES), and the home and preschool learning environments children experience before they arrive at school. Research indicates that each, independently, affects children's success in school (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001, McClelland et al., 2003, McClelland & Morrison, 2003, Morrison et al., 2005,
Purpose of the study and building the model
Using an ecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1986) in which multiple distal and proximal sources of influence, including children themselves, affect students' learning, the purpose of this study is to examine a core system of instruction (Cohen et al., 2003). specifically the relation of three key markers of teacher qualification — teacher elementary education credential, years of education, and years of experience teaching — to observed classroom practices, across three dimensions, as they
Data and the study sample
The 787 children, their families, and their first-grade teachers who participated in this study were part of the larger ongoing longitudinal NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (please see http://secc.rti.org/ for additional information on this study). The study has followed, since birth, a nationally representative sample of over 1000 children (NICHD-ECCRN, 2002a, NICHD-ECCRN, 2002b). In 1991, NICHD-ECCRN recruited 8986 mothers who gave birth in hospitals at 10 geographic
Teacher qualifications
Teacher qualifications included the teachers' number of years of education (Teacher Education), number of years of experience teaching (Teacher Experience) and whether teachers obtained an elementary school teaching credential (Credential). The information was obtained through teachers' report on the questionnaire (NICHD-ECCRN, 2002a, NICHD-ECCRN, 2002b) and is available in Table 1.
Because 97% of the teachers had their elementary school teaching credential, this variable was dropped from the
Grade 1 vocabulary
Vocabulary skills at first grade (Vocabulary 1) were assessed using the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Achievement-R, Picture Vocabulary subtest (Woodcock & Johnson, 1989/1990). This subtest, which is designed to assess expressive vocabulary, asks the child to name pictures of increasingly unfamiliar items. Descriptive statistics are provided in Table 1. For analysis purposes, raw scores were converted to W scores, which are a “special transformation of the Rasch ability scale” (Woodcock & Mather,
Analytic strategy
Structural Equation Modeling [SEM, AMOS 5.01, (Arbuckle, 1994–1999)], which permits structural modeling of observed and latent variables using maximum likelihood, was used in our analyses. We selected four measures of fit for our model following the recommendations from several sources (Hoyle, 1995, Klem, 2000, Kline, 1998). In addition to Chi-square, which is sensitive to sample size, we report Tucker and Lewis's fit index (TLI), as well as the comparative fit index (CFI). A non-significant
Direct and indirect effects of teacher qualifications on classroom practice and child outcomes
We hypothesized that teacher qualifications would impact student outcomes indirectly through teachers' practices in the classroom. This was tested by comparing two models — the first did not include any direct paths from teacher education and experience to students' outcomes. The second model added direct paths from the teacher qualification variables to the child outcome variables. These two models can be compared using their respective χ2 values because they are nested. The model with direct
Discussion
The purpose of this study was to examine a core system or model of instruction that included the effects of teachers' qualifications and classroom practices on student outcomes (Cohen et al., 2003), embedded within a larger system including SES, home, preschool and child characteristics that occurred prior to school entry or outside the classroom environment (Bronfenbrenner, 1986, Morrison et al., 2005). Our findings reveal multiple sources of influence on children's early language and literacy
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Child Health and Development U10HD38121, R01HD027176 and from the Department of Education R305H040013. We wish to thank Laura Klem, University of Michigan, for her advice on SEM, the members of the Pathways to Literacy Project for all of their help, and the families and teachers who participated in this project.
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