Positive Interactions Vital to Pre-K Learning

Positive interactions in a pre-kindergarten classroom may be equally or more important to the future academic development of 4-year-olds than learning letters and numbers, according to Dale Farran, senior associate director of the Peabody Research Institute at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College for education and human development.

There are two take-away main points:

First, there is a direct relationship between what goes on in classrooms and how much gain children make in self-regulation measures,” Farran said. “We haven’t known whether self-regulation was actually environmentally influenced or whether it just happened naturally with age.

Second, these data show which experiences children have in 4-year-old classrooms that affect development of those particular skills.”

Kirtland Peterson

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