Implications of different methods for specifying classroom composition of externalizing behavior and its relationship to social–emotional outcomes

In this paper, we examine common methods for using individual-level data to represent classroom composition by examining exemplary studies that thoughtfully incorporate such measures. Building on these studies, and using data from the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), this paper examines theoretical and analytical implications of a set of different transformations of individual ratings of child externalizing behaviors in order to examine and compare the influence of these representations of classroom composition on Kindergarten internalizing behaviors, social competence, and attention/impulsivity problems. Results indicate that each Kindergarten outcome is influenced by distinct aspects of classroom composition of externalizing behaviors. Kindergarten internalizing behaviors are positively associated with the proportion of children in the Head Start classroom who started with externalizing scores above the 75th percentile regardless of the average value of externalizing behaviors in the classroom. In contrast, Kindergarten social competence is predicted by three aspects of the classroom distribution of externalizing behaviors in the fall of Head Start—the classroom mean, standard deviation, and skew. Finally, Kindergarten attention/impulsivity problems were not associated with any aspect of classroom composition of externalizing behavior examined in this paper.     

Developmental changes in endogenous control of attention: the role of target familiarity on infants' distraction latency

This study evaluated the interactive effects of endogenous and exogenous influences on infants' attention allocation by assessing the role of target familiarity on distraction latency during object exploration. In Experiment 1 (N = 54), infants' distraction latencies as they investigated both familiar toys (ones they previously had seen in a familiarization procedure) and novel toys (ones they had not seen in the familiarization procedure) were assessed longitudinally at 6.5 and 9 months of age. In Experiment 2 (N = 32), infants' distraction latencies were assessed at either 6.5 or 10 months as they investigated either familiar or novel targets. In both experiments, older infants, but not younger infants, exhibited longer latencies as they investigated novel toys as compared with their latencies as they investigated familiar toys. These results are discussed in terms of developmental changes in the interactive effects of endogenous and exogenous factors controlling attention allocation.     

How Two- and Four-Year-Old Children Interpret Adjectives and Count Nouns

We examined the role of object kind familiarity (i.e., knowledge of a count noun for an object) on preschoolers' sensitivity to the relation between a novel word's form class (adjective or count noun) and its reference (to a material kind-property or to an object kind). We used a forced-choice match-to-target task, in which children learned a word for one object (e.g., a metal cup), and then chose between 2 other objects. One was from the same object kind but a different material kind (with different related properties, such as color and texture; e.g., a white plastic cup); the other was from a different object kind but the same material kind (with the same related properties; e.g., a metal spoon). In Experiment 1, children learned either a count noun (e.g., "This is a zav") or an adjective (e.g., "This is a zav one"). Within each form class, we crossed the familiarity of the referent object kind (familiar and unfamiliar) with the age of the children (2- and 4-year-olds). The principal finding was that in interpreting an adjective, 4-year-olds were more likely to choose the object sharing material kind with the target if the target was familiar than if it was unfamiliar. No such familiarity effect was evident among 2-year-olds. In Experiment 2, we employed a more unambiguously adjectival frame (e.g., "This is a very zav-ish one"), and replicated the results of Experiment 1. We interpret the results in terms of 2 proposed word learning biases: one that learners initially expect any word applied to an unfamiliar object to refer to a (basic-level) kind of object, and a second that learners prefer words to contrast in meaning. We consider several interpretations of the observed age difference.     

Individual differences and the development of joint attention in infancy

This study examined the development of joint attention in 95 infants assessed between 9 and 18 months of age. Infants displayed significant test-retest reliability on measures of following gaze and gestures (responding to joint attention, RJA) and in their use of eye contact to establish social attention coordination (initiating joint attention, IJA). Infants displayed a linear, increasing pattern of age-related growth on most joint attention measures. However, IJA was characterized by a significant cubic developmental pattern. Infants with different rates of cognitive development exhibited different frequencies of joint attention acts at each age, but did not exhibit different age-related patterns of development. Finally, 12-month RJA and 18-month IJA predicted 24-month language after controlling for general aspects of cognitive development.     

What children say about classroom performance: sex and grade differences in perceived competence

Naturalistic observations and interviews with children in kindergarten, first, second, and fourth grades (ages 5 1/2-10 years) were used to examine sex and age differences in evaluations of, and attributions to performance of, self and others. Observers coded the content of peer verbal exchanges during class work times, and the children were subsequently interviewed about their and their peers' classroom performance, as well as expectancies of performance on a novel task. Analyses of classroom observations generally supported previous laboratory findings; positive evaluation declined with grade level, and more negative self-evaluations and attributions were made by girls than by boys. In contrast, the interview measures did not show grade or sex differences in self-assessment; however, the consistency across interview and observation measures was greater at higher grade levels and for boys than for girls. Previous interpretations of age and sex differences in performance assessment are reexamined, and the possible impact of social context on evaluative statements is discussed.     

Infant temperament and subject loss due to crying during operant conditioning

Infants who failed to complete a 2-day operant-conditioning task were compared with a stratified random sample of those who did on measures of infant temperament and several demographic characteristics. A discriminant-function analysis revealed that female infants who cried differed from female infants who did not cry on measures of duration of orienting and latency to approach sudden or novel stimuli. Reliable prediction of crying and noncrying could not, however, be made for males. No sex differences emerged in the incidence of crying or in the number of sessions completed. Partially successful females (i.e., those completing 1 of the 2 sessions) could reliably be discriminated from those who cried during the first session on measures of age at testing and maternal ratings of smiling behavior. The results of this study suggest that, as with habituation studies, subject loss in operant-conditioning studies is influenced by individual differences among the infants which may or may not adversely affect external validity.     

The development of recollection and familiarity in childhood and adolescence: evidence from the dual-process signal detection model

Two experiments examined the development of recollection (recalling qualitative details about an event) and familiarity (recognizing the event) using the dual-process signal detection model. In Experiment 1 (n = 117; ages 6, 8, 10, 14, and 18 years), recollection improved from childhood to adolescence after semantic encoding but not after perceptual encoding and familiarity improved from ages 6 to 8 regardless of encoding condition. In Experiment 2 (n = 56; ages 6, 8, and 10 years), long duration compared to short duration of semantic encoding increased familiarity but not recollection. Age-related differences replicated those of Experiment 1, except no age difference in familiarity was found with long study duration. Overall, recollection and familiarity showed distinct developmental and functional characteristics. The dual-process signal detection model proved promising for developmental investigations.     

Coordinating attention to people and objects in mother-infant and peer-infant interaction

In a longitudinal study, infants 6-18 months of age were observed in their homes playing with their mothers and with peers. Of primary concern was how they coordinated their attention to people and objects. Observations were coded using a state-based scheme that included a state of coordinated joint engagement as well as states of person engagement, object engagement, onlooking, and passive joint engagement. All developmental trends observed were similar regardless of partner: person engagement declined with age, while coordinated joint engagement increased. Passive joint engagement, object engagement, and onlooking did not change with age. However, the absolute amount of some engagement states was affected by partner: both passive and coordinated joint engagement were much more likely when infants played with mothers. We conclude that mothers may indeed support or "scaffold" their infants' early attempts to embed objects in social interaction, but that as attentional capabilities develop even quite unskilled peers may be appropriate partners for the exercise of these capacities.     

Cognitive Arithmetic Differences in Learning Difficulty Groups and the Role of Behavioral Inattention

The objectives of this study were to (1) evaluate group differences in specific arithmetic competencies among students with various types of learning difficulties (LD) and (2) to examine the influence of attention behaviors on possible group differences. Participants were a community sample of 291 third‐ and fourth‐grade students with reading difficulties (RD) and/or math difficulties (MD), or with no LD (51 MD, 66 RD, 89 MD + RD, and 85 No LD students). Students were administered computerized measures of cognitive addition, subtraction, and estimation (accuracy and response times), as well as other measures. Groups were compared with and without covariation for behavioral inattention and their interactions. Small sums addition, thought to reflect retrieval processes, estimation accuracy, and number knowledge, did not show differences between MD and MD + RD students, although both showed lower performance than the RD and No LD groups. Attention behavior had a variable impact, most typically making group differences larger, but did not alter the general pattern of group differences, except in the case of estimation.     

The intentionality model and language acquisition: engagement, effort, and the essential tension in development.

The purpose of the longitudinal research reported in this Monograph was to examine language acquisition in the second year of life in the context of developments in cognition, affect, and social connectedness. The theoretical focus for the research is on the agency of the child and the importance of the child's intentionality for explaining development, rather than on language as an independent object. The model of development for the research is a Model of Intentionality with two components: the engagement in a world of persons and objects that motivates acquiring a language, and the effort that is required to express and articulate increasingly discrepant and elaborate intentional state representations. The fundamental assumption in the model is that the driving force for acquiring language is in the essential tension between engagement and effort for linguistic, emotional, and physical actions of interpretation and expression. Results of lag sequential analyses are reported to show how different behaviors--words, sentences, emotional expressions, conversational interactions, and constructing thematic relations between objects in play--converged, both in the stream of children's actions in everyday events, in real time, and in developmental time between the emergence of words at about 13 months and the transition to simple sentences at about 2 years of age. Patterns of deviation from baseline rates of the different behaviors show that child emotional expression, child speech, and mother speech clearly influence each other, and the mutual influences between them are different at times of either emergence or achievement in both language and object play. The three conclusions that follow from the results of the research are that (a) expression and interpretation are the acts of performance in which language is learned, which means that performance counts for explaining language acquisition; (b) language is not an independent object but is acquired by a child in relation to other kinds of behaviors and their development; and (c) acquiring language in coordination with other behaviors in acts of expression and interpretation takes work, so that acquiring language is not easy.     

Type A behavior in normal and hyperactive children: multisource evidence of overlapping constructs

1 goal was to identify correlates of the Type A "coronary-prone" Behavior Pattern (TABP) in children. A second was to examine the overlap between hyperactivity and TABP. In Study 1, a diverse set of measures reliably distinguished boys classified as Type A versus Type B on the basis of the MYTH, a teacher rating scale. The MYTH Competition subscale was related to perceived leadership, athleticism, and--when age and IQ were partialed out--to task attention in the classroom. The Impatience-Aggression subscale showed a different and more extensive configuration of correlates, including staff and peer assessments of problematic behaviors as well as classroom observations of noisemaking, verbalization, and social (particularly negative) contact. Hyperactive boys received higher Type A scores than did their comparison peers, a difference attributable to higher scores on the Impatience-Aggression subscale. Study 2, a partial replication conducted with a different group of hyperactive children, yielded a similar configuration of correlates. Discussion focused on the implications of the overlap between TABP and hyperactivity and, more generally, the heterogeneity of children designated Type A.     

Combinatorial skills: converging developments over the second year

Toddlers' combinatorial abilities were examined over several behavioral domains as a function of age (20 and 27 months) and task demands (familiarity of components, length of combinations, complexity of combinations, centered/decentered focus of action, behavioral domain). 6 specific domains were represented. Children's combinations were observed during elicited imitation in 4 of the domains (object play, pretense, social play, motor play) and spontaneous production in 2 others (language and peer-directed social overtures). Relative to younger children, older children produced more combinations of at least 2 or 3 discrete behaviors in every domain, including peer interaction, and fewer noncombinatorial behaviors. Consistent relations were also found across domains for production of combinations, that is, children who produced more combinations in one domain also did so in others. Finally, 4 of the 5 manipulated task demands proved to affect performance. Results are discussed in terms of possible age-related constraints on combinatorial skills that operate at a general, cross-domain level during toddlerhood.     

The effects of order of shock durations on helplessness in rats

Whereas rats exposed to a series of progressively decreasing shock durations show deficits in shuttle-escape performance 24 h later, the same number and intensity of shocks in the reverse (increasing) order of durations does not produce the “learned helplessness” effect (Balleine & Job, 1991). We conducted two experiments to establish the generality of this shock-duration order effect on other measures of distress and helplessness in rats. In Experiment 1, rats exposed to decreasing durations of inescapable shock showed reduced consumption of quinine-adulterated water (finickiness), whereas increasing durations produced no finickiness. By contrast, increasing shock durations produced greater conditioned fear to the shock context than did decreasing shock durations in Experiment 2. The differential effects of shock-duration order on finickiness and fear are explicated in terms of the specificity of fear conditioning during exposure to increasing versus decreasing series of shock duration orders.     

The Selectivity of Motion-Driven Visual Attention in Infants

The onset of motion was used to study stimulus-driven visual attention in 14-week-olds. The movement of an object did not capture attention reflexively at 14 weeks of age. The attention-getting properties of a moving stimulus depended significantly on its color in combination with the colors of other objects in the visual field. Specifically, detection of a green moving target was masked in the presence of mixed red and green static objects. No such masking was observed when the moving target was red or when the green target moved in a visual field that was populated only with green objects. The same effect was observed to a lesser extent when the green bars were replaced with gray bars. The number of distractors in the visual field exerted an effect on the accuracy of detection only when their appearance in the visual field was coincident with the onset of target motion. Attention to motion at this age is not independent of the structure of the visual field; chromatic preferences play a role in how readily infants attend to a moving object. These effects may be mediated by a difficulty in disengaging attention (from distractors) or in suppressing attention to competing objects once attention is engaged on a target.     

Dyadic activities and attention in the infant: A developmental study

Infants’ abilities to focus attention on objects are known to be related to mothers’ mobilizing behaviors. As delayed effects of maternal behaviors at 5 months may be observed in 8-month-olds, mothers may be considered as scaffolding their infant’s attention. However, all dyadic activities are probably not equally propitious to attention mobilizing. In a sample of 30 dyads, studied at 5 and 8 months of age, whole observations were split in four broad categories: care, dyadic play with objects, dyadic play without objects and infant alone. The duration of maternal mobilizing and infant attention focussing were studied within categories. Inter-dyads variability is high, while dyads are stable across ages. Even within the dyadic play with objects, mothers differ widely in the duration and way they mobilize attention. Five-month-olds still need their mother’s support, as they explore less when they are alone, while 8-month-olds are more autonomous. The impact and importance of the various types of dyadic activities on cognitive development are discussed.     

Classroom age composition and rates of change in school readiness for children enrolled in Head Start

Despite policy and theoretical support for mixed-age classrooms in early childhood, research examining associations between age-mixing and children's outcomes is inconclusive and warrants further investigation, particularly in preschools serving children who are at risk for poor adjustment to formal schooling. One recent study conducted in preschool classrooms serving low-income children found negative associations between age-mixing and children's social and cognitive development. The current study extended this research by examining associations between classroom age composition (variability in ages of children in the classroom) and low-income preschool children's rates of change in school readiness. The sample consisted of 4417 preschool children enrolled in 207 classrooms in a large, diverse urban Head Start program. Multilevel modeling was employed to examine the main effect of classroom age composition, as well as the interaction between classroom age composition and children's age, as predictors of children's rates of change in emergent literacy, emergent numeracy, social and emotional skills, and approaches to learning. In contrast to previous research, classroom age composition was not associated with school readiness outcomes. This study contributes to the conflicting literature examining the associations between age mixing and children's school readiness and calls for a future research agenda to examine age mixing in context that is focused on sorting out these conflicting results. In the meantime, policymakers should consider other relevant factors when making decisions regarding mixed-age classrooms, such as family preference or the capability for teachers to individualize instruction to children based on their individual needs.     

The effect of stimulus complexity on infant visual attention and habituation.

Infant visual attention and habituation were examined with a procedure providing independent assessment of an infant's latency of orienting to a pattern (attention getting) and his subsequent fixation of that pattern (attention holding). 18 male and 18 female, 17-week-old infants were given 2 trials with a red circle, 16 trials with either a 2 times 2, 8 times 8, or 24 times 24 checkerboard pattern, then 2 more red-circle trials. The major results were that habituation occurred in fixation time with males habituating more than females, and that a general decrease occurred in latency with females selectively increasing or decreasing their latency depending upon the pattern they had previously seen. These results indicated the necessity of separating attention-getting from attention-holding measures and that both sexes remembered something about the visual patterns but demonstrated that memory differently.     

Changes in the relation of self-efficacy beliefs and behaviors across development

Many social science theories that examine the connection between beliefs and behaviors assume that belief constructs will predict behaviors similarly across development. Converging research implies that this assumption may not be tenable across all ages or all belief constructs. Thus, to test this implication, the relation between behavior and beliefs about the self was examined in 2 independent data sets with 2 different constructs: aggression and achievement. The respondents were 6-18 years of age and predominately Caucasian. Results using quasi-simplex structural equation models suggest that self-beliefs become more strongly related to behavior as children grow older independent of the reliability of the measures used. Possible limitations in the use of self-report methodology with young children are discussed.     

Concordance of visual and manipulative responsiveness to novel and familiar stimuli: a function of test procedures or of prior experience?

Concordance of differential visual and manipulative responsiveness to novel stimuli at 6 months of age was found when differential attractiveness and familiarity of the stimuli were controlled. This finding corroborates the findings of an earlier study in which the same object was used as the familiarization object for all subjects. The data indicate that concordance at 6 months of age is not an artifact of the test procedure. A hypothesis suggested by the comparison of these findings with others in the literature is that the opportunity to manipulate a wide variety of objects in the natural environment may contribute to the concordance of visual and manipulative responsiveness to novel stimuli at this age.     

Effects of familiar and unfamiliar objects on mother-infant interaction

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the dynamics and structure of mother-child interactions around toys vary with the familiarity of toys. Twelve mother-child dyads with a 5- or 9-month-old infant were filmed two consecutive 5-minute sessions in the presence of familiar or novel objects. By relating the mother’s behaviour to her infant’s, we were able to define episodes consisting of phases of joint engagement of the two partners on the same topic or reference object. In a context involving familiar objects, mothers more often took the initiative to introduce a topic, and they kept the child’s attention focused on the object for longer periods, by means of various manipulations. In contrast, the attractiveness of the novelty gave the infants more initiative, and the mothers followed the child by providing mostly verbal support.