Instructional Support and Academic Skills: Impacts of INSIGHTS in Classrooms With Shy Children

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: This study investigated how mean classroom-level shyness scores moderated the impacts of INSIGHTS into Children’s Temperament on instructional support and students’ math and reading skills in kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms. INSIGHTS is a temperament-based social-emotional learning intervention with teacher, parent, and classroom programs. A total of 22 low-income urban elementary schools, 90 teachers, and 435 children were included in the study. Schools were randomly assigned to INSIGHTS or an attention-control condition. Multilevel modeling demonstrated larger impacts of INSIGHTS on instructional support in 1st-grade classrooms with greater mean classroom-level shyness scores. A further set of multilevel analyses showed larger impacts of INSIGHTS on math skills for students in classrooms with greater mean classroom-level shyness scores. Practice or Policy: Results suggest the importance of considering temperament at the classroom level when deciding how to allocate limited resources to the implementation of temperament-based intervention and/or social-emotional learning programs. Moreover, providing professional development supports to teachers of shy students—who are at risk for poorer instruction and academic skills—should be considered by policymakers and practitioners.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, we use the term shyness to describe a temperament that is high in withdrawal/low in approach. See O’Connor et al. (2014b) for more detail on the use of this terminology and the operationalization of shyness using the withdrawal/approach dimension from the School-Aged Temperament Inventory (McClowry, 2002).

2. Instructional support, although shown to be important for supporting students’ academic skills (e.g., Pianta et al., 2016), is just one component of a number of teacher practices—including delivery of content and content knowledge—that are important for improving students’ outcomes in the early grades (Engel et al., 2013; Kunter et al., 2013).

3. Note that these data were drawn from a larger study that tested the main effects of the INSIGHTS intervention on classroom and student outcomes. Thus, the research questions examined are considered exploratory in the context of the full study.

4. In McClowry’s (2002) identification of temperament typologies, the School-Aged Temperament Inventory (McClowry, 2002) is used to operationalize four temperament profiles: (a) High-maintenance children are high in negative reactivity, high in motor activity, and low in task persistence; (b) industrious children are high in task persistence, low in negative reactivity, and low in motor activity; (c) cautious/slow to warm up children are high in withdrawal/low in approach; and (d) social/eager children are low in withdrawal/high in approach.

5. Because there was significant variation in the number of students participating in the study by classroom, we conducted a check to determine whether we observed similar ICCs for classrooms with almost complete participation (90% or more) versus the full sample of classrooms. This approach allowed us to have 12 total classrooms to examine for levels of between-classroom variation. Findings from ICC analyses at the classroom level and descriptive research were fairly well aligned with the broader set of classroom findings. Within this group of 12 classrooms, we found that 31% of the variation in shyness was between classrooms. The between-classroom variation in the full sample was 28%. In addition, we found that the standard deviation for shyness in these classrooms (SD = 0.43) was aligned with that in the full sample (SD = 0.47 across both treatment and control groups). Accordingly, we did not find that the overall distribution in the high-participation classrooms was significantly different from what we had originally found in the full sample.