Confident Parents and Teachers Make Successful Students – Julia Ogg

What does it take for a child to be successful in school, and what do children need from adults to help them be successful? 

According to Dr. Julia Ogg, Associate Professor and School Psychologist, children need to develop “academic enabling” classroom behaviors to be successful. These are behaviors that support learning, like motivation, engagement, and interpersonal skills. The ability to work in a group or ask for help are prime examples of academic enabling behaviors.

“These behaviors are especially important for children with externalizing behavior”—such as self-regulation difficulties—“to learn, because such children may struggle managing their behavior in the classroom,” says Ogg.

As a school psychologist, Ogg’s research has often bled into her practice. She specifically became interested in understanding the experiences and needs of children with externalizing behaviors while doing practicums in schools. “I noticed that a lot of young kids struggled in school with self-regulation, attention, and hyperactivity,” she shared. “Often, it was difficult to know how to best support these students.”

During her training to become a school psychologist, Ogg had the opportunity to consult with preschool teachers using an evidence-based program to support positive behaviors. This experience ignited her interest in supporting adults as they help children develop academic enabling behaviors. “What I learned from the preschool teachers is that when they were supported and given the tools to support students, there was significant improvement in students’ behavior,” reflected Ogg. “There was also an improvement in the student-teacher relationship, and teachers felt more confident in their work.”

Ultimately, Ogg hopes to develop a universal academic-enabler intervention for schools to provide this kind of support to teachers and students. As a first step, she and her colleagues are collecting focus group data from teachers to get their perspectives on which academic enablers they think kids need in the classroom. They are also asking teachers what tools they are currently using and what kinds of resources they would like to have.

While she is just getting started analyzing the data, Ogg has noticed a couple of emerging themes. “One, teachers are more worried about this than ever before,” she stated. Ogg also mentioned that teachers don’t have a lot of materials for teaching children academic enabling behaviors, “so they are seeing a big need for it.”

Supporting children with attention difficulties means working with their caregivers. Accordingly, Ogg also studies parenting attitudes and behaviors that support the development of academic enabling classroom behaviors in children.

In a recent “daily diary study”, Ogg and her colleagues examined the associations between a child’s ADHD symptoms and parents’ home-based involvement in their child’s education. They found that parents who rated their children as having attention difficulties tended to doubt their parenting skills and feel that the quality of their involvement in their child’s education was low. Interestingly, statistical analyses showed that parental self-efficacy—parents’ confidence in their parenting skills—seemed to drive the perception of low-quality involvement, rather than the other way around.

 “It really highlights the important role of parents feeling confident and knowing what to do. When parents feel efficacious in helping their child, they are more likely to engage in involvement behaviors in a positive way,” explained Ogg.

Self-efficacy is important for supporting all caregivers, whether that’s parents or teachers. “We need to feel confident and know what to do in order to do it effectively,” emphasized Ogg. She hopes that her research will lead to evidence-based interventions that build parents’ confidence in helping their children academically and provide teachers with tools for supporting academic enabling behaviors in their classrooms.

About the author: Melissa Clucas Walter is on CISLL’s executive board and is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at NIU.