posted on 2014-06-18, 00:00authored byBridget K. Hamre, Robert C. Pianta, Jason T. Downer, Jamie DeCoster, Andrew J. Mashburn, Stephanie M. Jones, Joshua L. Brown, Elise Cappella, Marc Atkins, Susan E. Rivers, Marc A. Brackett, Aki Hamagami
Validating frameworks for understanding classroom processes that contribute to student learning and development is important to advance the scientific study of teaching. This article presents one such framework, Teaching through Interactions, which posits that teacher-student interactions are a central driver for student learning and organizes teacher-student interactions into three major domains. Results provide evidence that across 4,341 preschool to elementary classrooms (1) teacher-student classroom interactions comprise distinct emotional, organizational, and instructional domains; (2) the three-domain latent structure is a better fit to observational data than alternative one- and two-domain models of teacher-student classroom interactions; and (3) the three-domain structure is the best-fitting model across multiple data sets.
Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge the National Institute for Child
Health and Human Development for support of the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development,
the Interagency Consortium on School Readiness for support of the MyTeachingPartner study, the
National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), W. Steven Barnett, the Pew Charitable
Trusts, and the Foundation for Child Development for their support of the SWEEP Study, and the
U.S. Department of Education for its support of the Multi-State Study of Pre-Kindergarten. Links
to Learning is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (PI: Atkins; R01MH073749). The
New York City Study of Social and Literacy Development is supported by grants from the U.S.
Department of Education in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control (R305L030003)
and the William T. Grant Foundation (# 2618) to J. Lawrence Aber (PI), Jones and Brown (co-PIs),
and by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation (#7520) to Jones and Brown (co-PIs). The
RULER intervention study is funded by the William T. Grant Foundation (#8364) to Brackett (PI),
and Rivers & Salovey (co-PIs).