Classroom Management Impacts Students

A new study explored the long-term impacts of a pre-school quality improvement programme for low-income children on their self-regulation and academic skills in high school.Longitudinal teacher professional development and coaching intervention took place in 35 Head Start classrooms across 18 centres in 2004 and 2005.

Under the new Chicago School Readiness Project(CSRP) study, the researchers hypothesize that providing teachers with positive classroom management and stress reduction strategies may have led to a more positive classroom climate, which in turn resulted in immediate improvements in students' self-regulatory and academic skills. 
The programme, which focused on teachers' professional development and classroom management, boosted participants' grades in high school, which the researchers say was explained partly by academic gains made in pre-school.

The study was conducted by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is published in Child Development, a journal of the Society for Research in Child Development.