Psychology

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    EMOTIONS AND COPING IN THE CONTEXT OF TEACHING: REFLECTIONS OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS
    (2021) Briody, Jill Margaret; Teglasi, Hedwig; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Teaching is an emotional roller coaster. Not enough pre-service teachers are prepared for the daily barrage of emotions they will experience when they enter the professional world or for the critical need they will have to effectively manage those emotions. Limited awareness of the role of emotions and management thereof may lead to reduced effectiveness in the classroom and higher rates of burnout. The current mixed methods study explored how pre-service teachers from an elementary education undergraduate program at a large Mid-Atlantic public University think about their emotions and the management of those emotions in the context of teaching. Emotions are a difficult construct to accurately capture and research often relies on self-report measures to do so. In addition to self-report measures, this study employed narratives, about significant teaching experiences to examine more deeply pre-service teachers’ emotions, the situations that elicit those emotions, and the management of those emotions through coping. Results indicated that pre-service teachers reflect on a range of emotions, with 95% mentioning negative emotions when writing about a classroom experience and 96% mentioning positive emotions. The most frequently used category of emotion words was “fear,” by almost 70% of participants. Furthermore, almost 60% of pre-service teachers agreed that they regularly experience waves of strong feelings about their teaching experience, when responding to items on the Impact of Event Scale-Adapted. Yet almost 60% of pre-service teachers described coping that was coded as unrealistic or non-coping in at least one of their narratives. While almost all pre-service teachers included emotions in writing about significant teaching experiences, very few reported emotions or coping as a concern when asked explicitly what they were worried about. Among the situations that elicited the most negative emotions and/or were reported as most worrisome were the shift in responsibility from mentor teacher to pre-service teacher, lesson planning, time management, individual student social-emotional well-being, and whole class behavior/classroom management. The current study illustrated the importance of using multiple methods to capture the complexities of multifaceted constructs like emotions and coping. Implications for pre-service teachers, educator preparation programs, and researchers are discussed.
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    Executive functions, effortful control, and social skills as predictors of externalizing behaviors in kindergarten children: A within-informant approach
    (2020) Albrecht, Jessica; Teglasi, Hedwig; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The relations of executive functions (EF), effortful control (EC), social skills, and externalizing behaviors were examined based on performance measures and rating scales collected from parents and teachers of kindergarten students. Externalizing problems encompass the most prevalent mental health disorders for children at the kindergarten age. Prior research has found that children who exhibit difficulties with self-regulation (EF, EC) or who lack social skills are more likely to develop externalizing problems in early childhood and beyond. However, these constructs have largely been studied separately, and no studies to date have measured EF, EC, and social skills in relation to children’s externalizing behaviors across different methods of measurement and across parent and teacher informants. The current study contributed to the literature on externalizing behaviors in young children by testing the unique contributions of EF, EC, and social skills to externalizing behaviors for parents and teachers separately. Results indicated that there was low agreement between parents and teachers, but that agreement was higher for children rated in the top 15% of externalizing problems. There were both similarities and differences in the relations of constructs for home and school settings. Greater informant-reported global EF deficits, low ratings of global social skills, and low effortful control were predictive of more externalizing behaviors across parent and teacher informants. However, differences were observed at the subscale level for the specific EF deficits and social skills that predicted parent-reported versus teacher-reported externalizing problems. Additionally, many performance measures of EF, including the NEPSY-II scales and the TAT, significantly predicted teacher-reported externalizing behaviors, but not parent-reported externalizing behaviors. Overall, relations are moderate to high between constructs when both are assessed with the same informant and method of measurement. Implications of these findings for both practitioners and researchers are discussed.