Using Social Work Science and Trauma-Informed Care to Identify Mechanisms of Change for Preschool Expulsion Risk

Background and Purpose: Exposure to trauma can negatively impact children’s behaviors and has been linked to increased risk of preschool expulsion – a prevalent problem with adverse long-term socioeconomic consequences. Trauma-informed (TI) school interventions, such as training, developed for older children are linked to reduced expulsion rates, however it is unclear through what mechanisms TI interventions may influence school discipline rates. Teacher’s TI attitudes include aspects such as understanding underlying causes of a child’s behaviors/symptoms and self-efficacy in responding to children’s trauma-related problem behaviors. Teachers with higher TI attitudes may be more flexible and confident in understanding and addressing children’s challenging behaviors, which may result in less likelihood of moving toward expulsion. The current study tests the hypothesis that teachers with more TI training would have higher TI attitudes which would be related to lower expulsion risk for an identified child in their classroom.

Methods: In the current study, 136 preschool teachers from five Head Start programs in the Mountain West completed an online survey of their receipt of TI training, TI attitudes, and expulsion risk for the child they identified as having the most challenging behaviors in their classroom. TI training was measured through the number of trauma-related topics a teacher reported having received training on. TI attitudes were measured using the Attitudes Related to Trauma-Informed Care (ARTIC) measure and expulsion risk was measured using the Preschool Expulsion Risk Measure (PERM). Covariates included child and teacher race/ethnicity, child gender, and teacher education. A indirect effects path analysis was run in Mplus to test the hypothesized model.

Results: The model had a good fit to the data [X² (1, N=136)=1.28); RMSEA=.04 (90% CI=[.00, .24]); CFI=.98; TLI=.89; SRMR=.03]. The pathway from TI training to TI attitudes was not significant (B=.14, p=.10), although trended in the hypothesized direction. The direct pathway from training to expulsion risk was not significant. However the pathway from TI attitudes to expulsion risk was significant (B=-.33, p<.00), indicating that higher TI attitudes predicted lower expulsion risk within the sample.

Conclusions and Implications: Study findings provide partial support for the conceptual model by demonstrating that preschool teachers with higher TI attitudes may be less likely to move toward expulsion. These findings highlight TI attitudes as a meaningful mechanism to target when seeking to reduce rates of preschool expulsion through TI social work interventions. Future research should focus on developing more nuanced ways to measure dosage of TI training and identifying the extent to which different TI school-based models are associated with improvements in TI attitudes. Since preschool expulsion rates are disproportionate based on race and gender, future research may also examine whether teachers with higher TI attitudes report fewer racial and gender disparities in children’s outcomes. As schools increasingly seek to become “trauma-informed,” social work science can elucidate the role that TI attitudes play in improving children’s outcomes, thereby informing social intervention research targeted at improving the well-being of trauma-exposed children and the school contexts in which they develop.