Transactional Associations Between Academic Skills and Social Competence From Kindergarten to Third Grade

ABSTRACT BODY: Recent efforts to promote school readiness have emphasized the need to include program components focused on both pre-academic skills (emergent reading and math skills) and social-emotional competencies (social competence, learning engagement). Longitudinal data documenting potential cross-domain associations across the transition to school are relatively rare.

Methods: Participating children (N = 345; 189 girls and 156 boys; 59% European-American, 24% African American, and 17% Latino) were drawn from 44 Head Start classrooms in three counties in PA. Participants were followed through the transition to 82 elementary schools. Child assessments and teacher reports were collected each spring beginning in pre-K and ending in third grade. Two social-emotional competencies were examined: Teacher reports of children’s emotion regulation and prosocial behavior formed a latent Social Competence factor; and teacher reports of Learning Behaviors and Inattention (reverse scored) formed a latent Learning Engagement factor. Math was assessed each year using the WJ Tests of Achievement III – R Applied Problems scale. Assessments making up a latent Reading factor varied to accommodate developmental shifts in the nature of reading competence and included scales from TOPEL (Elision, Blending, and Print Awareness; pre-k), the WJ-III-R Letter-Word ID (K-2^nd), and TOWRE (Sight Word Efficiency, Phonemic Decoding; K-3^rd).

Results: Autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation models tested transactional relationships between emerging Reading and Math skills and both Social Competence and Learning Engagement. All models controlled for the stability in each measure. Math skills predicted higher Social Competence and Learning Engagement at subsequent time points; conversely, Learning Engagement predicted higher Math skills over time (all p < .001). In Reading models, Pre-K Reading predicted higher social-emotional competence in K (p < .001). Only Learning Engagement predicted increased Reading competence from K to 1^st (p < .001).

Conclusions: There was consistent evidence that emerging math skills predicted improvements in social-emotional competencies over time; evidence for similar effects of reading skills were strongest from the pre-K to K transition. Evidence that social-emotional competencies predicted changes in academic skills was more limited. The strong stability of social-emotional competencies supports the view that school readiness is best promoted through distinct program components targeting pre-academic and social-emotional competencies.