For elementary school students, classrooms that offer few textbooks and stressed-out teachers may be more than just an inconvenience; according to a study by researchers at this university, the environment could be affecting those students’ mental health.
Sociology professor Melissa Milkie and sociology doctoral student Catharine Warner found that students with insufficient resources and teachers who felt underappreciated were more likely to have mental health issues — a conclusion drawn in a report issued last month after the two researchers followed the progress of 10,700 first-grade students in schools across the country.
Warner said this study shows classroom environments do have an effect on students, therefore more time and money should be invested in them.
“It’s exciting in a sense because we can do something about this,” Warner said. “The classroom environment really matters — we can’t go in and change everybody’s entire life, but the classroom setting is somewhere really accessible, it’s something that is fixable.”
Warner added she hoped the research would be useful to ascertain funding for schools with infrastructure and resource issues because it proves how important these are to children’s health.
“It is sad for students to come to a school lacking basic resources,” Warner said. “The findings looked at socio-emotional issues instead of just grades and academics, how happy kids are in school and not just how well they’re doing there.”
Sean Reardon, a sociology of education professor at Stanford University, said while the study is important, it cannot definitively determine why the correlation exists.
Reardon said the correlation that Milkie and Warner favored was that “bad classroom environments create stress and strain on young children that cause them to have more behavioral and mental health problems.”
He noted there could be two other conclusions. One explanation implies reverse causation: that children who have more mental health issues require more resources and attention, which could lead teachers to report that they don’t have enough resources or support from colleagues. The other implies that students who have mental health problems in general tend to be from lower socio-economic brackets and attend schools with fewer resources to being with. This explanation would mean there is no cause and effect.
Reardon said that no matter what the reason is, the study’s findings are still important to the education world.
“The study is useful because it clearly demonstrates a pattern of correlation between teachers’ perceptions of classroom and school conditions and student behavioral and mental health problems,” Reardon said. “What we need now is a clearer understanding of why that is the case and what policies and practices might both improve teachers’ working conditions and reduce children’s behavioral and mental health problems.”
In a press release, Milkie said it wasn’t just the findings of her study that were important — even the fact that work was being done in the field of children’s mental health at school was critical.
“Sociologists and other researchers spend a lot of time looking at work environments and how they are linked to the mental health of adults, but we pay less attention to the relationship between kids’ well-being and their ‘work’ environments — namely their schools and more specifically their classrooms,” she said in the press release.
Senior elementary education major Laura Byrnes, who has been student-teaching for the past year and will work for Teach For America in the fall, said the study supports what she has seen in the classroom.
“I’m not surprised, especially that students who have teachers who are stressed and feel under-appreciated are negatively impacted by that,” Byrnes said. “It’s the responsibility of a teacher to ignore whatever they are stressed about and check it at the door.”
Byrnes noted while classes do not focus specifically on students’ mental health, they do focus on creating a positive environment in the classroom. She also pointed out that when teaching in a school with limited resources, sometimes a teacher needs to take things into her own hands.
“A lot of our classes focus on building community, helping students recognize that school is a safe haven and basically just working together and learning from each other,” Byrnes said. “A teacher’s job is not just to teach the material but also to help students grow and get them on the right path.”
farrell at umdbk dot com
