First-grade classroom behavior: its short- and long-term consequences for school performance.

Effects of children's classroom behavior on school performance over a 4-year period are examined for a large, representative panel of beginning first graders. Scales developed from homeroom teachers' ratings of children in the spring of their first, second, and fourth years of school are used to predict spring marks in reading and math and spring scores on verbal and quantitative subtests from the CAT battery. The teachers' ratings cluster in three domains: Interest-Participation (I-P), Cooperation-Compliance (C-C), and Attention Span-Restlessness (A-R). The I-P and A-R ratings, but not C-C ratings, affect test score gains in first grade and marks in all 3 years. Behavior ratings from Year 1 also affect Year 2 and Year 4 performance, with indications that effects are understated over single-year periods. The importance of assessing classroom behavior in a longitudinal framework that allows for lagged and cumulative effects is discussed.

Beginning school math competence: minority and majority comparisons.

This article uses a structural model with a large random sample of urban children to explain children's competence in math concepts and computation at the time they begin first grade. These 2 aspects of math ability respond differently to environmental resources, with math concepts (reasoning) much more responsive to family factors before formal schooling begins than is computation. In this sample, blacks and whites are equivalent in terms of computational and verbal skills as measured by the California Achievement Test at the start of grade 1. However, there is a significant difference of about a quarter of a standard deviation favoring whites over blacks in terms of math concepts (reasoning skills). Both black and white children of all socioeconomic levels respond to parents' psychological resources: net of ability or other factors, children score higher if parents expect them to do well. Socioeconomic resources in the home also help both groups. In particular, the parent being a high school graduate as opposed to a dropout is important. When parents' material and psychological resources are taken into account, family configuration (solo motherhood vs. other types) has no discernible effects on either type of math performance.

Achievement in the first 2 years of school: patterns and processes.

How successfully children adapt to the routine of schooling in the first grade or two likely has long-term implications for their cognitive and affective development. This study aims to understand how home and school factors either facilitate or impede this process of adaptation by examining longitudinal data on cognitive performance for a large and diverse sample of youngsters over grades 1 and 2 in Baltimore City Public Schools. Report-card marks in reading and mathematics and scores on verbal and quantitative subtests of the California Achievement Test (CAT) battery over the 2-year period are the achievement criteria. The analysis directs attention to some of the social-structural (socioeconomic background, gender, and minority/majority status) and social-psychological (significant others and self-reactions) factors that shape youngsters' development during this period, as measured by changes in their cognitive standing. Racial comparisons (black youngsters vs. white) and comparisons by school year (first vs. second) highlight some key differences in the transition to full-time schooling. We find more numerous social-structural and social-psychological influences on CAT gains over the first year than over the second, and fall to spring stability in testing levels is more pronounced in the second year than in the first. This pattern identifies the first year of schooling as a period of considerable consequence for shaping subsequent achievement trajectories, and, for this reason, it may be especially important as a key to understanding black-white achievement differences. Minority and majority youngsters in this sample began school with similar CAT averages, but, by the end of the first year, blacks' performances lagged noticeably behind those of whites, and the cleavage widened over the second year. Blacks also received lower report-card marks than whites. This, along with smaller CAT gains, reveals that the transition to school is more problematic for blacks than it is for whites. We also observed stronger persistence of blacks' marks from one period to the next, indicating that recovering from these initial difficulties is more challenging. Social-psychological aspects of these early achievement patterns also differ by race in important ways: blacks' achievements are less influenced by parent variables than are those of whites, and black youngsters' self-expectations are less affected by the expectations held for them by their parents than are those of whites. These results and others are discussed in terms of their implications for students' development and for what they reveal about social structure in relation to the early schooling process.

The emergent academic self-image of first graders: its response to social structure.

One aim of this investigation was to determine the kinds of information a large and racially diverse sample of urban first-grade children take into account in forging their image of an academic self, especially the extent to which evaluations of significant others versus self-evaluations are influential. Another aim was to determine whether the nascent academic self-image affects the school achievement of these first-grade children. There was no difference in children's academic self-image according to race or parent background, but children of the 2 sexes defined their images differently. Girls' images strongly reflected stereotypic sex-role notions; boys' images reflected instrumental role concerns. Math performance was relevant only for boys. Boys depended more on self-evaluations than girls did, while girls depended more on parents' evaluations. Black girls were the only group for whom the academic self-image was a significant influence on achievement gains over first grade. The discussion points up the correspondence between these findings and what has been found for adolescents.

Children's ability to recognize other children's faces.

Facial recognition ability was studied with 288 children from 4 grades--first, second, third, and sixth--who also varied by sex race, and school type, the last being segregated or integrated. Children judged whether each of 40 pictures of children's faces had been present in a set of 20 pictures viewed earlier. Facial recognition ability increased significantly with each grade but leveled off between ages 8 and 11. Blacks' performance is significantly better than whites', and blacks are better at recognizing faces of whites than whites are at recognizing blacks. Children from an integrated school show smaller differences recognizing black or white faces than children from segregated schools, but the effect appears only for children of the integrated school who also live in mixed-race neighborhoods.

Preparation during pregnancy and ability to cope with labor and delivery.

Within nine weeks following childbirth, 279 new mothers were interviewed to determine effects of preparation for labor and delivery on their perceptions of childbirth and their babies. The more preparation a woman had, the more aware she was at delivery, and that awareness was strongly associated with positive reactions to the birth and the baby. These findings are interpreted in terms of theory on coping with stress.