Literacy, Teachers, and Emotions

There is now a growing recognition among educators and educational psychologists that the role of schools and schooling is to develop both literacy-numeracy and well-being skills of students, rather than targeting either one or the other (Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, & Linkins, 2009; UNESCO, 2016). That is, education should aim to help students to flourish by not only ‘doing good’ but also ‘feeling good’. Indeed, students’ cognitive and affective skills are closely connected (Shankland & Rosset, 2017), even though some students tend to do better in one area than the other (OECD, 2017). To attain this ultimate objective of education, teachers play a fundamentally prominent role and, therefore, should be empowered and equipped to effectively facilitate both academic and non-academic development of their students (OECD, 2018). The present issue puts together six papers focusing on these distinct but intertwined areas: literacy, teachers, and emotion.

The studies reported in the first two papers in the present issue sought to identify ways to develop literacy skills in early childhood. In the first paper, Pulido and Morin’s (2018) focussed on ‘invented spelling’ – the term coined by Read (1986) to represent the ‘creative’ ways that young children adopt when attempting to spell words based on how the words sound to them. Specifically, these researchers randomly assigned classes of 6-year-old French-speaking children in Quebec (Canada) into one of four conditions which each exposed the children to the correct spellings (a conventional condition), to slightly more challenging spellings (a proximal condition), to slightly more sophisticated spellings before the correct spellings were presented (a proximal + conventional condition), and a series of phonological trainings (a control condition). While all the conditions improved literacy skills, the conditions that harnessed the children’s initial invented spellings and exposed them to optimally more advanced spellings (especially the proximal condition) were found to be more effective. These findings attest to the value of considering the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) in optimizing learning, which can be done by identifying children’s baseline literary skills before developing these skills gradually and systematically from there.

Moving to the African region, the focus of the paper by Mulcahy-Dunn, King, Nordstrum, Newton, and Batchelderer (2018) was on investigating grit and self-control and the role of these soft skills in predicting the reading performance of second graders in Tanzanian rural areas. The authors first reported on the validity of scenario-based self-report questionnaires they locally developed to assess grit and self-control. Their analysis then indicated a general trend suggesting that children with higher levels of grit and self-control tended to have relatively better reading performance than those whose levels of grit and self-control were lower. Lastly, their regression analysis showed that grit predicted reading performance more strongly than socioeconomic status (SES), even after controlling for the children’s sex, age, and region of origin. Overall, the study left us with an optimistic note in that efforts to improve children’s literacy skills can be done by targeting their soft skills which are arguably more malleable than their sociodemographic background factors such as sex, age, SES, and place of origin.

The teachers and their teaching quality are the focus of the next two papers in this issue. In a study with more than 400 teachers in Malaysia, Onn, Yunus, Yusof, Moorthy, and Seow (2018) examined the mediating role of trust in relating organizational justice (and its specific dimensions: procedural, distributive, and interactional justice) to organizational citizenship behavior. Partial least square analysis showed that trust significantly mediated the relationships between organizational justice (and, to varying degrees, its specific dimensions) and organizational citizenship behavior. These findings have provided new insights into the importance of one’s perceived organizational justice in bolstering one’s trust in the leadership and management of the organization and driving one to become a more contributing and productive citizen of the organization. That the finding was demonstrated in a sample of teachers suggests that teachers’ perceived justice and their trust of the teaching institution could be important factors for their teaching engagement and, in turn, their students’ engagement and performance as well.

Indeed, the study by Fryer and Ginns (2018) provided empirical evidence for longitudinal and reciprocal relationships between students’ perceptions good teaching (e.g., the extent to which teaching staff put a lot of time into comment on students’ work) and their own deep learning (e.g., the extent to which students see how all the ideas they learn are inter-related). With a data from a large sample of Japanese university students, the analysis showed that perceived good teaching positively predicted deep learning 9 months later, and that deep learning also positively predicted perceived good teaching nine months later. These results were remarkable considering that prior variance shared with each outcome variable was accounted for. Their finding also indicated that deep learning positively predicted students’ Grades Point Average. Taken together, the two papers pertinent to the teachers and teaching quality in this issue highlight the connectedness between organizational climate, teacher engagement, student learning, and student achievement.

The last two papers in this issue dealt with emotion, resilience, and mental well-being – three inter-related non-cognitive constructs that play a crucial role in students’ academic lives. In a longitudinal study following refugee children residing in Canada, Gagne, Janus, Milbrath, Gadermann, and Guhn (2018) examined the role of the children’s emotional and communication functioning at kindergarten in predicting their academic trajectory group membership. Results of group-based trajectory modeling identified three distinct groups which the researchers named ‘Average’, ‘Declining’, and ‘Low-But-Improving’ Academic Trajectories. Using Average Academic Trajectory students as the reference group, logistic regression analyses revealed that lower emotional functioning at kindergarten was associated with an increased likelihood of students being classified into the Declining Academic Trajectory group, whereas lower communication functioning at kindergarten was associated with a greater likelihood of students being classified into the Low-But-Improving Academic Trajectory group. The authors concluded that refugee children are more likely to overcome early communication challenges rather than emotional challenges to achieve academically, and this has important implications for early mental health support for these children.

In the last paper in this issue, García-Izquierdo, Ríos-Risquez, Carrillo-García, and Sabuco-Tebarar (2018) examined the role of resilience in moderating the effects of academic burnout dimensions (viz. cynicism, efficacy, and emotional exhaustion) on psychological health in a sample of Spanish nursing students. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that, besides the main effects of resilience, efficacy, and emotional exhaustion on psychological health, resilience also moderated the effect of emotional exhaustion on psychological health. The moderation suggested that students with a lower level of resilience and a higher level of emotional exhaustion tended to have the lowest level of psychological health.

In summary, the six papers in this issue, collectively, have invited us to deeply think about the educational implications and future research endeavors pertinent to the quality of teachers’ instruction and its role in the development of students’ cognitive and affective skills. Each of the papers has gone through a rigorous and iterative review process, and for this I would like to sincerely thank the reviewers who have provided their scholarly inputs to bring these six papers to their highest quality, and the editorial team who have facilitated the review process of these papers.