Child Temperament And School Readiness: Surgency/Extraversion, Negative Affect, Effortful Control, And Pre-Academics In Preschool And Kindergarten Students

The purpose of the current study was to examine the associations among certain temperament traits and early indications of academic performance in preschool and kindergarten children. Three temperament domains—Negative Affect, Surgency/Extraversion, and Effortful Control—were examined in relation to two areas of children’s school readiness skills—language and concepts. The parents of 72 preschool and kindergarten students in a rural Appalachian Mountain community rated their children’s temperaments using the Child Behavior Questionnaire, Very Short Form (CBQ-VSF; Putnam & Rothbart, 2006). The participants were also assessed with the Language and Concepts subtests on the Developmental Indicators of the Assessment of Learning (DIAL-4; Mardell & Goldenberg, 2011). Canonical correlation analysis was used to examine the relationships between the variables. Despite prior research suggesting that child temperament may be linked to academic performance in older children, no significant relationships were found in the current study. Additional research may be needed to consider the complexity of these relationships within preschoolers and kindergarteners separately.