Zulauf-McCurdy Courtney A, Brooks Rechele, Meltzoff Andrew N
Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Ann & Robert H., Lurie Childrens Hospital of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA.
Prev Sci. 2025 Sep 15. doi: 10.1007/s11121-025-01838-3.
Preschool children in the United States are expelled at a rate of about 250 per day with a disproportionate number being Black children. There is a need to better understand how to prevent preschool expulsion. Using a random-assignment experiment, preschool teachers (N = 95; 92% female; 61% White) were assigned to one of eight conditions: child race (Black vs. White) child gender (boy vs. girl) parental cooperativity (cooperative vs. uncooperative). Teachers read two controlled vignettes: one about a child and one about that child's parents. The child vignette described the child's challenging classroom behavior (identical behavior for all children); the parent vignette described a subsequent meeting with the child's parents (half of the parents were described as uncooperative with the teacher and half as cooperative). After each vignette, teachers were asked to complete sections of the Preschool Expulsion Risk Measure (PERM) to assess two known risk factors for preschool expulsion: (a) teachers' perception of the disruptiveness of the child's classroom behavior and (b) teachers' feelings of hopelessness about changing the child's behavior. Even though the child's challenging behavior was controlled (by experimental design), teachers' construal of the child's behavior and teachers' feelings of hopelessness towards the child were significantly influenced by the descriptions of parental cooperation. Variations in results by child race and child gender are also reported. Findings indicate that teachers' perceptions of parents may be a particularly important factor to prevent children from preschool expulsion.
美国学龄前儿童每天被开除的比率约为250人，其中黑人儿童的比例过高。有必要更好地了解如何防止学龄前儿童被开除。通过一项随机分配实验，学龄前教师（N = 95；92%为女性；61%为白人）被分配到八个条件之一：儿童种族（黑人与白人）、儿童性别（男孩与女孩）、家长合作性（合作与不合作）。教师阅读两个对照的 vignette：一个关于孩子，一个关于那个孩子的家长。孩子的 vignette 描述了孩子在课堂上具有挑战性的行为（所有孩子的行为相同）；家长的 vignette 描述了随后与孩子家长的会面（一半家长被描述为不与教师合作，一半为合作）。在每个 vignette 之后，教师被要求完成学龄前儿童开除风险量表（PERM）的部分内容，以评估两个已知的学龄前儿童被开除的风险因素：（a）教师对孩子课堂行为干扰性的感知，以及（b）教师对改变孩子行为的绝望感。尽管孩子具有挑战性的行为是通过实验设计进行控制的，但教师对孩子行为的理解以及教师对孩子的绝望感受到家长合作描述的显著影响。还报告了按儿童种族和儿童性别的结果差异。研究结果表明，教师对家长的看法可能是防止学龄前儿童被开除的一个特别重要的因素。
