Children who do not have well-developed social and behavioral skills early on are at greater risk for later academic failure than their more socially skilled peers (Raver, 2002;Shonkoff &Phillips, 2000). Research suggests that high-quality home and school environments may provide promising avenues for preventing social and behavioral difficulties among young children and thus for improving their academic achievement. The proposed study will significantly advance the scientific knowledge base about the skills and behaviors that comprise social competence and provide compelling new evidence about the synergistic effects of children's home and school environments on their social, behavioral, and academic outcomes. Through analysis of existing datasets from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this innovative research will generate new knowledge by: (1) identifying the skills and behaviors that comprise social competence using multiple dimensions of these skills collected from numerous respondents (parent, teacher, child, observer) across settings (home, school, lab) between early childhood and adolescence;(2) providing vital estimates of the causal relations between social competence and achievement by rigorously correcting for observed family and child characteristics;(3) examining alone and in combination critical aspects of children's home and school environments to deepen our understanding of the risk and protective factors present in these environments and determine the situations in which children are most susceptible to these contexts. The first objective is to develop and test theoretically informed measurement models of children's social competence based on multiple constructs gathered from multiple informants and to examine measurement invariance across early childhood and adolescence using structural equation modeling (SEM). We propose that social competence may best be described as a single underlying construct rather than as multiple constructs and that this construct will be stable over time. The second objective is to determine the direction of the association between social competence and achievement using autoregressive cross-lagged models in SEM. We suggest that causal pathway begins with social competence rather than achievement. The third objective is to delineate risk and protective factors in both the home and school that influence the development of social competence and achievement, determine whether the hypothesized relations between these contexts and outcomes are stronger at certain ages, and identify the moderating processes by which these dimensions impact social and academic outcomes. We hypothesize that children's social and academic skills will derive from a combination of home and school experiences that work synergistically to produce positive outcomes and that these contexts will have differing effects on their social outcomes over time. The fourth objective is to examine linear and non-linear associations between sleep parameters and children's outcomes over time. We propose that better sleep practices will be associated with better social and academic skills over time.
The proposed study will advance the scientific knowledge base about the skills and behaviors that comprise social competence from early childhood through adolescence and will generate novel evidence that can be readily translated into programs and practices that support positive development across this period. Findings will be especially applicable to prevention work due to our focus on the home and school processes that generate positive outcomes across domains. Finally, we will carry out the proposed research at a time when there are intensive debates about what """"""""best practices"""""""" for children look like;the proposed research will inform these debates by investigating systematically which programs and practices work, for whom, and under what conditions.
| Birmingham, R S; Bub, K L; Vaughn, B E (2017) Parenting in infancy and self-regulation in preschool: an investigation of the role of attachment history. Attach Hum Dev 19:107-129 |
| Bub, Kristen L; Robinson, Leah E; Curtis, David S (2016) Longitudinal associations between self-regulation and health across childhood and adolescence. Health Psychol 35:1235-1245 |
