Project Activities
The research team will use a longitudinal research design to observe student and teacher classroom behavior three times over the course of a school year. They will also give participating students a battery of developmental and academic measures in the fall and spring of the school year. Researchers will analyze these data to identify relationships between teacher instructional behavior and student outcomes.
Structured Abstract
Setting
The study will take place in general education classrooms in large, diverse public school districts in northern CA.
Sample
Participants will include a total of 200 kindergarten-3rd grade students (100 with ASD; 100 without ASD) and their credentialed general education teachers.
Factors
Factors examined in this project include teacher instructional behavior, student participation, and developmental and academic outcomes in mathematics and reading. Teacher instructional behavior is conceptualized as a combination of extending talk, knowledge building, thinking and reasoning, encouraging interaction, and responsiveness to students' contributions. Student participation is conceptualized as a combination of emotion regulation, attention regulation, behavior, flexibility, classroom productivity, communication initiations, and responses. Potential moderators of the interaction between these factors include classroom-level factors (classroom organization) and student-level factors (autism symptoms, joint attention, social attention, and cognition).
Research design and methods
This project uses a quantitative longitudinal research design and systematic observational data collection. Video samples of student and teacher behavior will be collected three times in a school year and coded by trained observers. Twice per school year, researchers will also assess students' cognitive, adaptive, and executive functioning; maladaptive behavior problems; sensory processing patterns; receptive vocabulary; and mathematics and literacy achievement.
Control condition
Participants will include students without ASD as a comparative sample so researchers can examine similarities and differences in teacher instructional behavior and student participation between students with and without ASD.
Key measures
Researchers will create a multi-dimensional measure of student active participation by combining components of the Creating Opportunities to Learn from Text observation tool and the Classroom Measure of Active Engagement observation system. Classroom organization will be measured with the Quality of the Classroom Learning Environment. Autism symptomology will be measured with the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Second Edition, the Early Social Communication Scales, and the NEPSY-II. For student developmental outcomes, researchers will measure student cognitive functioning (Differential Ability Scales, Second Edition), adaptive functioning (Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Third Edition) and executive functioning (Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning-2), maladaptive behavior (Child Behavior Checklist-Teacher Report Form), and sensory processing patterns (Sensory Profile 2). Student academic achievement will be assessed with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth Edition and the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement.
Data analytic strategy
Structural equation modeling (SEM) will be used to evaluate the dynamic relations among the student and teacher behavior, student- and classroom-level potential moderators, and student developmental and academic outcomes. Latent growth curve models will be used to evaluate change in student and teacher behavior over time.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Products: This project will identify relationships between teacher behavior, student behavior, and student outcomes as well as the factors that may moderate them. The project will result in a shared final dataset, peer-reviewed publications and presentations, and products that reach education stakeholders such as practitioners and policymakers.
Related projects
Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigator: Mundy, Peter
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
