The Role of Behavioral and Instructional Match in the Prediction of Early Classroom Engagement and Academic Achievement

The idea that instructional strategies should be matched to individual student skills has a long history in education. Recent research indicates that the match between child skills and teacher instruction in the early elementary grades is critical to children's reading achievement. In this project, researchers will examine teacher instructional strategies as a moderator of child grade entry skills in predicting literacy achievement at 2nd and 3rd grade. Researchers will use data from the Family Life Project (FLP), a representative sample of every baby born to mothers who resided in three poor rural counties in North Carolina over a one year period. This survey also includes an oversampling of poor African American families. The project team will examine how variations in the match between teacher instructional strategies and child grade entry skills are associated with children's engagement in the classroom and literacy achievement. Further, researchers will examine whether children's engagement in the classroom serves as a mediator of the associations between the teacher-child match (i.e., teacher instructional strategies X child grade entry skills) and children's literacy skills. Researchers will also explore whether the importance of children's engagement in the classroom for literacy achievement is similar or different across 2nd and 3rd grade. Finally, the project team will explore whether their model differs for African-American and non-African-American children.