Abstract
Anxiety and internalizing concerns are among the most common challenges in early childhood, disproportionately affecting children of color and youth from low income communities. Early anxiety problems are also associated with concurrent behavior problems and social-emotional difficulties. Without appropriate identification and support to develop necessary social and emotional competencies, children with these concerns may be underprepared for early schooling, putting them at risk for poorer academic outcomes and later psychological and behavioral problems. Although social-emotional teaching strategies have shown promise for reducing challenging externalizing behavior and improving social-emotional skills for preschool children, broadly, their specific effect on anxiety and internalizing behavior remains unclear. Given the social-emotional challenges demonstrated by children with anxiety, there is a need to understand the impact of social-emotional teaching strategies on such concerns, in order to develop strategies to prepare these children for early school success and prevent the consequences of unrecognized internalizing difficulties.
While it has been well established that risk factors for anxiety manifest in early childhood, information about how anxiety presents in the classroom context as observed by teachers is lacking. The anxiety concerns of children in low-income and early childhood settings may be overlooked because of the lack of available tools to assess these issues in context and the emphasis on more readily observable externalizing behavior in classroom settings, even though anxiety and externalizing problems are not mutually exclusive. As such, the objectives of this dissertation project were as follows: (1) to establish the psychometric properties of a teacher-report measure of early childhood anxiety (Teacher-Preschool Anxiety Scale, T-PAS) in Head Start and Title I classrooms, and (2) determine whether teachers’ observed use of social-emotional teaching strategies predicts spring anxiety problems as reported by teachers.
Results demonstrated that a four-factor solution for the T-PAS was the most suitable solution, with each subscale and the total score having acceptable to good reliability. As expected, the T-PAS was correlated with other measures of internalizing behavior and maladaptive learning behavior. However, teacher use of social emotional teaching strategies did not significantly predict anxiety in the spring on any of the subscales of the T-PAS. Implications for teacher measurement of anxiety are discussed, as well as recommendations for improving the impact of social-emotional teaching programs on internalizing problems.