Does a good fit matter? Exploring teaching styles, emotion regulation, and child anxiety in the classroom

Abstract

The central goal of the present study was to examine how a child's emotion regulation ability may moderate the relations between teaching styles and anxiety in childhood. Participants were 33 children (21 males, 12 females; mean age 7.5 years, standard deviation = 0.42), their mothers and teachers. Children completed the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire – Revised to assess their emotion regulation, mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist to assess their child's anxiety and teachers completed the Teaching Styles Inventory to assess various teaching styles. Results indicated different patterns of associations between teaching styles and anxiety for well‐regulated versus dysregulated children. For example, it was found that children who are better able to regulate their emotions are better at coping with the potentially stressful context brought on by the expert teaching style than those children lower in regulation abilities. Preliminary evidence suggested that different teaching styles might be associated with different outcomes among children with differing regulatory characteristics. Results are discussed using the goodness‐of‐fit model.

Keywords:

• teaching styles
• goodness of fit
• emotion regulation
• childhood anxiety