Can teacher-child relationships alter the effects of early socioeconomic status on achievement in middle childhood?

Character strengths, meaning in life, personal goal, and career adaptability among impoverished college students: A chain-mediating model

Background

Career adaptability is an important building block for career success. Research on the career adaptability of disadvantaged students is therefore essential. The study aimed to explores the impact mechanism of career adaptability among impoverished students.

Methods

Using the Character Strengths Questionnaire, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, the Personal Goal Scale and the Career Adaptability Scale, 1119 impoverished college students were surveyed.

Results

The results revealed that character strengths can not only positively predict career adaptability, but also indirectly affect career adaptability of impoverished students through the chain mediation meaning in life and personal goal. The results showed the mechanism of character strengths on the career adaptability among impoverished students.

Conclusions

Our study found that meaning in life along with personal goal can enhance the positive impact of character strengths on career adaptability. These findings have implications for the practice of career counseling for impoverished college students.

Preschool Children's Observed Interactions with Teachers: Implications for Understanding Teacher-Child Relationships

Theory and research point to the daily interactions between individual children and teachers as formative to teacher-child relationships, yet observed dyadic teacher-child interactions in preschool classrooms have largely been overlooked. This study provides a descriptive examination of the quality of individual children's interactions with their teacher as a basis for understanding one source of information theorized to inform children's and teachers' perceptions of their relationships with each other. Children's dyadic interactions with teachers, including their positive engagement, communication, and conflict, were observed across a large and racially/ethnically diverse sample of 767 preschool children (M = 4.39 years) at three time points in the year. On average, most children displayed low-to-moderate levels of positive engagement (78%), while nearly all children showed rare communication (81%) and conflict (99%) with the teacher. Boys demonstrated lower positive engagement and higher conflict with the teacher than girls. Black children were observed to demonstrate higher positive engagement with the teacher compared to White children. No differences in interaction quality were observed for Black children with a White teacher compared to White child-White teacher or Black child-Black teacher pairs. Results advance our understanding of dyadic teacher-child interactions in preschool classrooms and raise new questions to expand our knowledge of how teacher-child relationships are established, maintained, and modified, to ultimately support teachers in building strong relationships with each and every preschooler.