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A child is seen as successful in school when a positive attitude about school and learning is developed; supportive social ties with teachers and classmates are formed; comfortable and positive emotions, as well as positive engagement and participation in the classroom, are experienced; and academic achievement and progress are shown.
Research on school readiness has focused on early markers that are closely related to children’s school success. Thus, early signs of cognitive ability and maturity, children’s work-related and learning-related social skills and self-regulatory skills have been identified as factors that contribute to and define “school readiness”. Children’s age is also a marker of school readiness insofar as it indicates maturity in the cognitive, social and self-regulatory domains. However, age per se is a poor predictor of later school success.
Other factors may influence children’s success in school and life, including attributes of the child, family, previous child-care environments and the nature of relationships with teachers and peers. These factors seem to operate according to an interactive (i.e. multiplicative) and transactional (i.e. bi-directional) mode rather than an additive mode. To illustrate, children bring to school their own individual attributes, such as gender, age, aptitude, language, prior experiences and behavioural dispositions (e.g. aggressiveness, self-regulatory abilities, sociability and anxiety-withdrawal), all of which may affect the way they approach their classmates, teachers and the school environment. In turn, the nature of the relationships that children form with teachers and peers makes an independent contribution to their psychological and school adjustment, above and beyond children’s own behavioural and cognitive dispositions. Chronic exposure to the negative (e.g. rejection/victimization by peers or teachers, friendlessness) or positive aspects of these social experiences (e.g. peer-group acceptance) has greater consequences for children’s psychological and school adjustment than transient exposure.
Parents also have a role to play in determining their child’s readiness for school. The quality of parent-child relationships, specifically parental sensitivity and stimulation, has a clear and frequently documented correlation with early school success, either as a main contributor or a protective factor. Also, the quality of the relationship between the parents before their child enters school (Cowan and Cowan) has been shown to predict the child’s social and academic competence throughout elementary and high school.
There is also research demonstrating that attributes of children’s child-care environment directly affect a child’s transition and adjustment to school. These effects appear even more pronounced among children exposed to high-risk conditions. Programs based on principles of quality care, higher caregiver training and smaller child-staff ratio all contribute positively to a child’s readiness for school. Instructional needs and children’s ability to profit from school depend on the types of instructional settings they encounter as they move from home to school and from grade to grade.
Schools and communities make also significant contributions to children’s connections with school, both in the transition process and in later school engagement.
In sum, a child’s initial experiences in school are critical. Research suggests that children’s school outcomes, especially achievement, remain remarkably stable after the first years of school; interventions are more likely to be successful in the early school years; and how children adapt to their earliest school experiences has long-term implications for cognitive and social development and for dropping out of high school.
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