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Commencement Marshal Kristen Bub: Good Behavior, Good Grades?

As a marshal for HGSE's 2008 commencement exercises Kristen Bub, Ed.D.'08, considers this final chapter of her Ed School experience as bittersweet. "I am really excited to be done and to be moving on to a new phase on my life. I am also very sad to be leaving the community I have come to know and love," Bub says. "There really isn't any place like HGSE, and a large part of me wishes I could stay. But I also know it is time to move on."

For 11 years, Bub worked closely with Dean Kathleen McCartney as a research assistant on the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which further opened her eyes to the effects of high-quality early education experiences on children's social, behavioral, and cognitive skills.

"The idea in the past was if you want a child to do well academically then you focus on language, science, and math skills," Bub says. "No one considered social and behavioral development until more recently...but if a child can't concentrate [in the classroom], then he can't learn to read."

A child's social and behavioral development and academic achievement go hand-in-hand, according to Bub. "A child can't learn from peers if those peers don't like the child. Furthermore, if a teacher doesn't like a child, then the child may disengage from learning," Bub says. The limited educational research or recognition of social and behavioral development as important for academic achievement intrigued Bub, who has spent years studying how the two intersect.

Her dissertation extended beyond the early childhood period and into early elementary school in an effort to understand whether continuous high-quality learning experiences between pre-kindergarten and third grade can help sustain the positive effects of early childhood education on social, behavioral, and academic skills. Bub studied how children's social and behavioral development -- for example how they develop relationships, behave, or self-regulate -- affects their ability to learn. For her dissertation, she looked at data on 500 children, pre-kindergarten through third grade, from 10 states. So far, early research indicates that children who have better social skills in pre-kindergarten, first grade, and third grade do better academically in fifth grade -- and likely beyond -- than their peers with poor social skills. In contrast, children with behavior problems at these ages exhibited lower academic achievement in fifth grade.

High-quality classroom experiences, especially during early childhood, provided critical supports for children's social and behavioral development. "Children who have positive relationships with teachers appear do better socially and academically in part because they trust their teachers," Bub says. Positive classroom experiences can also created a learning environment where a child can ask for help, show more respect, and generally perform better academically. This is a win-win situation for many teachers and other students in the classroom since it promotes more learning opportunities with fewer distractions.

However, getting to that point is a challenge for many early childhood teachers, who often receive little educational support and manage up to 12 children in a classroom at a time. As a result of her research, Bub hopes to provide strategies for teachers in responding to children who struggle to develop positive social and behavioral skills.

In today's age of standardized tests and increasing special education reforms, Bub suspects that attention to a child's social development and additional training of teachers may have an even larger pay off further down the road. "Children are young and malleable so if we invest early, the payoffs will be far greater and much less expensive than remediation later on," she says.

Bub will continue to look at this issue after leaving HGSE. Following graduation, Bub will work as an assistant professor in the Human Development and Family Students Department at Auburn University in Alabama. As a professor, she will teach courses in Early Childhood Education and Advanced Research Methods.

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