How Do Classroom Conditions and Children's Risk for School Problems Contribute to Children's Behavioral Engagement in Learning?.

Abstract. The primary objective of this investigation was to examine the way in which two facets of the classroom environment (classroom quality and instructional contexts) and children's risk for school problems combine to predict children's behavioral engagement in third-grade classrooms. As part of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, observations were conducted on 955 children in 888 third-grade classrooms. Results revealed that children were more likely to be engaged within small groups and during analysis-inference instruction than in large group activities, individualized work settings, and basic skills instruction. Classroom quality and children's risk status were also uniquely associated with behavioral engagement. Children at risk for school problems particularly benefited from higher classroom quality within more demanding instructional contexts. ********** Thirty years of research in education and developmental psychology point to behavioral engagement in learning as a critical condition for predicting children's academic achievement (Brophy & Good, 1986; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). In fact, academic growth is more successfully modeled when information is available about children's attention to and behavioral engagement toward specific forms of instruction, rather than simply their exposure to instruction (Greenwood, 1991). As such, behavioral engagement in learning has become an issue of national importance as policy makers, principals, teachers, and school psychologists work toward the goal of improving children's academic progress in the classroom. Two perspectives on children's behavioral engagement in the classroom have dominated the literature. The first places an emphasis on classroom conditions (e.g., group format, focus of instruction, quality) that afford high engagement among children (e.g., Dolezal, Welsh, Pressley, & Vincent, 2003; McWilliam, Scarborough, & Kim, 2003), whereas the alternative approach focuses on child attributes that place children at risk for reduced engagement in learning and school problems (e.g., Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2002). Very little literature exists, however, that examines the degree to which these classroom conditions and child attributes (operationalized here in terms of children's risk for school problems) complement each other to explain children's behavioral engagement in learning, a topic explicitly addressed in the present study. For school psychologists and teachers, this dual, integrative focus is an important component of collaboratively identifying classroom-based interventions that support behavioral engagement in school while taking into account those classroom conditions that may be most challenging for children identified as at risk for school problems. Conceptual Approach The present work conceptualizes (and operationalizes) behavioral engagement in learning as children's observed involvement in a teacher-sanctioned academic activity designed to promote achievement within a school context. Two theoretical approaches offer a framework for this work. First, the bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) provides a useful framework for understanding the significance of children's behavioral engagement in the classroom as a mechanism leading to academic growth and learning. This perspective considers multiple levels of analysis: person, process, context, and time. At the process level, proximal processes refer to the "engines of development" and describe children's regular, reciprocal, and increasingly complex interactions with teachers, peers, or other adults, as well as physical objects in their environment, that lead to development. Behavioral engagement is precisely that--moments when children are interacting with their physical and social environment in ways that produce learning. Important to this conceptualization, the quality and nature of these proximal processes is determined, in part, by the person and the context. …