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.
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