Attachment and Learning in Early Childhood Education: Group Randomized Control Trial in a Head Start Center

Background and Purpose: Secure caregiving attachments provide protective factors leading to positive developmental outcomes across cognitive, social-emotional, and behavioral domains for young children.  Furthermore, trusting caregiving relationships help shield children from the negative impact of early childhood adversity such as poverty, toxic stress, and trauma.  Increasingly, the important role of caregiver extends beyond the nuclear family to include environments such as early childhood educational settings. Evidence shows that high-quality early student-teacher relationships can protect children from maladaptive problem behaviors and promote future academic success in important areas such as executive functioning, social skills, language skills, early literacy, and school readiness. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship-based training, Circle of Security-Classroom (COS-C) attachment-based approach, with early childhood educators (ECE) in Head Start (HS) classrooms and to examine the effectiveness of this approach on perceived student-teacher relationship quality, and classroom, teacher, and student well-being outcomes.

Methods: A clustered randomized control trial (RCT) design was used with random assignment of ECEs at the classroom group level to receive either COS-C or Training-as-usual (TAU) during a 2-month period. Total sample included 8 classrooms, 20 early childhood educators, and 128 students.  ECEs range from 25-40 years of age and educational backgrounds extend from high school to some college level training.  Forty-five percent of educators are African American, 45% White, and 2% Hispanic. The student population is approximately 82% African American, 14% Hispanic, 2% White, and 2% Other. ECE reported on student-teacher relationship quality as well as individual student behavior in the classroom.  ECE also reported on self-efficacy, depression, job stress, and attitudes toward impact of trauma in education. ECE in the COS group provided feedback on usefulness of the training in survey and narrative form. Descriptive, correlational, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and a mixed effects regression model were conducted to test intervention effect a student- and teacher-levels.

Results: Results from this study show significant differences in COS-C and TAU groups. ECEs in COS-C group report on average higher perceived closeness with students at post-treatment than the TAU groups.  ECEs in COS-C groups also reported positive significant differences in students’ self-regulatory behaviors as compared to students in the TAU group. No differences were found in teacher’s level of self-efficacy, depression, or stress scores. Qualitative feedback from ECE report increased understanding of children’s attachment behaviors and strategies to meet emotional needs underlying challenging behaviors.

Conclusions and Implications: Results from this study have important practice and policy implications regarding ECE professional development around increasing knowledge, awareness, and skills in meeting key attachment needs essential for early learning. The COS-C training is a cost-effective professional development model that increases ECEs knowledge of social-emotional development needed for healthy student-teacher interactions for our youngest and most vulnerable student population.  Focusing on healthy attachment-like relationships for young students can lead to important social emotional developmental gains and perhaps close educational achievement gaps sooner in children who have experienced adverse caregiving environments.