Amulya Agrawal
School attachment is the degree to which a student feels adjusted to school emotionally, socially, and academically. Previous studies have shown that school attachment seems to be a significant buffer for a number of negative developmental outcomes in adolescents. For example, school attachment is negatively correlated with aggression, depressive symptoms, and with high-risk behaviors such as alcohol consumption, drug use, and smoking.
To our knowledge, researchers have not examined school attachment in preschool-aged children. Yet, brain development is most rapid during early childhood, and the foundations for later social, emotional, and behavioral well-being are established during this developmental period. Given that school attachment seems to buffer adolescents from a variety of negative outcomes, it may have similar importance during other developmental periods. If school attachment is a viable construct, measurable during early childhood, it could suggest early intervention opportunities.
The present study pilots a school attachment measure for preschool aged children and explores associations between school attachment and children’s anxiety symptoms, controlling for temperament. Children’s school attachment was determined by both parent and children responses to an early childhood school attachment form designed by the researchers. Temperament was determined by parent responses to an established temperament questionnaire and anxiety by teacher responses to an established preschool anxiety scale. Temperament and anxiety were measured in the beginning of the school year while school attachment was measured in November. Anxiety will be measured again at the end of the year for comparison.
Data analysis is currently underway to determine if the variables collected thus far show any preliminary correlations. Significant correlations may suggest that our measure is viable in measuring school attachment in early childhood aged children. Such results have implications that could change our approach to preventing negative developmental outcomes and possibly increase its efficacy.
Comments
Hi Amalya. With the disruptions of Covid, how do you plan on continuing your research with these participants? I’m very excited about your work because this seems to be a very important topic to understand more about; do you have any ideas on follow-up research questions, perhaps about causes of early-aged school attachment (or lack thereof)? Great work overall! – Evana Wang
Hi Evana! Good question. Originally, teachers were supposed to fill out the same anxiety questionnaires in April for each child. The COVID-revised plan is to send the questionnaire electronically to teachers and ask them to think back to the last time they saw their students when answering questions. The retrospective design will introduce some limitations to the study, but we’re going to roll with it and see what we find! As for follow-up research questions, there’s so many directions to go because school attachment in early childhood hasn’t been studied much. I would be very interested to see how school attachment differs between children in different types of early childhood education programs (perhaps comparing those using more interactive instructive instruction to those without) to see if there’s certain elements of a school environment that seem to be linked to school attachment in preschool-aged children. Thanks for your question! – Amulya Agrawal
I’m sorry I misspelled your name! Amulya! – Evana Wang
I am wondering what goes into children feeling “safe” at school. How do you operationalize feeling safe? – Kylie Northam
That’s a great question! Most literature looking at “safety” at school for preschool-aged children find that it has a lot to do with how much children trust their peers and teachers. In my interviews with children, the questions that fell into the component I named “sense of safety” within school attachment asked how hard it was to say goodbye to parents, how much they like coming to school, and generally how safe they felt in their class. Hope that helps! – Amulya Agrawal
I really like the figure you’ve used to indicate the correlations — it’s a very clear way to spell out what measures you’re interested in, while showing how they relate to each other. – Rob Reichle
Thanks so much Dr. Reichle – I’m glad it was clear! – Amulya Agrawal