Children's Social Behaviors in Relation to the Quality of Teacher-Child Interactions and Teachers' Beliefs

This study examined how the quality of teacher-child interactions and the teachers' beliefs about their influence on children's social behaviors were related to children's social behaviors. The subjects were 206 children at the age of five and 52 of their teachers in 49 daycare centers. Children's social behaviors were recorded using observational categories. The quality of teacher-child interactions was measured by a rating scale that originated from the OSDCP (Rhee et al., 2003). The results were as follows: 1) Children who experienced high-quality interactions with their teachers showed fewer purposeless solitary behaviors and negative behaviors toward their peers and interacted toward their teachers more frequently than did those who experienced low-quality interactions with their teachers. 2) Children whose teachers believed that they had a great deal of influence on children's social behaviors displayed fewer purposeless solitary behaviors and more positive behaviors toward peers than did children whose teachers considered their influence less important. 3) After controlling the contributions of children's gender and teacher's training experience, the quality of teacher-child interactions and teachers' beliefs explained about 14% of the total variance of children's purposeless solitary behaviors. In addition, the quality of teacher-child interactions and teachers' beliefs accounted for 6% of the total variance of children's positive behaviors toward peers. Also, the amount of explanation of the predictive variables accounts for 9% of the total variance of children's behaviors toward their teachers.