Kortney Roher
Research Summary 3
This research study is called “Teacher–Child Relationships and Academic Achievement: A Multilevel Propensity Score Model Approach” and it was conducted by Meghan P. McCormick, Erin E. O'Connor, Elise Cappella, and Sandee G. McClowry. The study was published in 2013 by Elsevier and is volume 51 issue 5 and is pages 611-624 in the Journal of School Psychology.
This study was conducted primarily to obtain information on if child-teacher relationships affect the student’s achievement in elementary school and how it does so. Additional studies find that high-quality teacher–child relationships may promote academic suppleness among lower-income, racial/ethnic minority children at-risk for poor accomplishment. The experimenters were not sure if different ages would affect the outcomes of their study so they multi-aged children who’s tendency to score replicas to estimate the effects of high-quality teacher–child relationships in kindergarten on standardized measures of student math and reading achievement in first grade in 22 urban elementary schools. They conducted this experiment in three inner-city schools containing mostly black and Hispanic children, they tested children ranging in ages from four to eight. They used 362 children and then 60 different elementary teachers. The teachers went out of their way to develop a relationship with certain children, they would later use a specific scale to rate how well their relationship was with the child. They concluded from this study that nine out of ten times the better the student-teacher relationship then the higher the student achieved in math for the kindergarten and first grade students. For the first graders though, the better relationship between the student and teacher did not increase the overall achievement in reading scores.
I thought this was an interesting study, especially because the teacher-student relationship increased one subject achievement and not the other....