Classroom environment influences on aggression, peer relations, and academic focus
Section snippets
Summary and overview
This study addressed three main questions as follows. (a) What are the concurrent relations among individual children's behavior (teacher ratings of aggression, peer relations, and academic focus), classroom environment (aggregates of the teacher ratings of individual behavior) and school environment (poverty, measured by free/reduced lunch rates and academic achievement, measured by standardized statewide tests)? (b) What are the longitudinal relations between individual children's behavior
Participants
Data were collected as part of a research project that evaluated the effectiveness of the Coping Power intervention program for aggressive children Lochman & Wells, 2002, Lochman & Wells, 2003. Prior to the start of the intervention, fourth grade teachers in 65 different classrooms in 17 different schools completed a screening questionnaire for 1382 (50% female) children. Teachers indicated race for 93% of the students: 53% were African American, 40% Caucasian, 3% Hispanic, and 4% were Native
Preliminary analyses on race and gender
Preliminary analyses examined the influence of race and gender on the dependent and independent measures to evaluate if they should be included as predictors in the analyses. T-tests indicated that at each time point boys were rated more poorly than girls on each of the individual teacher scales (Aggression, Poor Peer Relations, and Poor Academic Focus), p<.001, but boys and girls did not differ in the classroom or school environment measures. T-tests also revealed that Caucasians were rated
Discussion
This study helps elucidate the nature of the relations between individual behavior and classroom and school environment characteristics. Findings suggest that each of these environmental factors plays a role in accounting for children's aggression, peer relations, and academic focus, but classroom environment (assessed by teacher ratings of individual behavior) might play a more important role than school environment. As expected, poorer classroom environments were associated with poorer
Acknowledgements
The completion of this article has been supported by grants to the fourth author from the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (UR6 5907956; KD1 SP08633), National Institute for Drug Abuse (DA 08453; DA 16135), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (R49/CCR 418569), and the U.S. Department of Justice (2000CKWX0091). We would like to thank Michael Windle and Jamie DeCoster for their help with HLM analyses.
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