Classroom process quality and literacy skills in Portuguese and Belgian first grade classrooms

Abstract

Understanding factors associated with children's early skills is of vital importance to children's later school success. Accumulating evidence points to the role of two key classroom processes: teacher-child relationship quality and classroom climate. Warm and close relationships have been associated with positive school adjustment, whereas high levels of conflict have been linked to adjustment difficulties. Positive emotional climate and a well-organized classroom, in particular, are relevant for children's learning outcomes. Despite this growing body of research, thus far few studies have provided comparative data on the quality of classroom processes and their links with literacy skills across countries. The present study, examined, first, the measurement invariance of classroom climate using the CLASS (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2006) and student-teacher relationship quality using the STRS (Pianta, 2001) in Portuguese and Belgian samples. The second goal of the study was to investigate whether classroom process quality predicts literacy skills similarly across these two countries after taking relevant background variables into account. Participants were 158 Portuguese children (45% girls) and their teachers from 105 first grade classrooms and 197 Belgian children (52% girls) and their teachers from 35 first grade classrooms. The results indicated that the presuppositions for measurement invariance (equivalence of factor structure and factor loadings) held to a large degree for both classroom process quality using the CLASS and student-teacher relationships using the STRS. Moreover, the findings suggested that literacy skills can be supported by sensitive and responsive interactions with teachers both in Portuguese and Belgian classrooms.