UVa study: Many U.S. first-graders served poorly by schools, teachers

Some of America’s first-graders may not be getting the academic content they need, according to a new study by two University of Virginia researchers.
The researchers used data from direct observations of 820 first-grade classrooms in nearly 700 private and public schools in 32 states, assessing the social and instructional quality of interactions between teachers and students.

The quality of those interactions was determined by specially trained raters who made judgments about the kind of interaction and the frequency based on scoring guidelines.
For example, a teacher ignoring a student with a question would score low on “sensitivity,” while a teacher who responded quickly would score high.
Based on observations, researchers grouped the classrooms into four major categories. Teachers who worked to both create a positive social climate and strong instructional support — 23 percent of classrooms — were given the score of “high overall quality.” Twenty-eight percent of classrooms had teachers scoring just below the mean and were deemed “mediocre.” Seventeen percent of the classrooms were “low overall quality.”

The largest category in the sample, accounting for 31 percent of the classrooms, was labeled “positive emotional climate, low academic demand,” where teachers interacted warmly with the students and did not discipline with threats.
However, “low academic demand” indicated a tendency to not give constructive feedback — for instance, not asking students to think harder about their questions.
Part of a 17-year longitudinal study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the study sought to identify factors that measure teacher quality based on the evidence in the data collected from the large classroom sample.

The study found that factors traditionally thought to influence quality, such as class size and teacher credentials, had little influence on classroom quality. Instead, the study found that “high classroom quality” is linked strongly to teachers who are both creating a positive social climate and offering strong instructional support.
Robert Pianta, dean of UVa’s Curry School of Education and director of its Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, and Megan Stuhlman, a senior research scientist, published the study in the March issue of The Elementary School Journal.