The development of a teacher-report measure of the preschool executive function environment

Executive function (EF) skills are crucial for preschoolers’ development of school readiness skills and future achievement. Given the rapid development of the prefrontal cortex in early childhood, preschool classrooms are an important context for promoting students’ EF skills. Nevertheless, the preschool EF environment has never been defined, and there are no assessment tools available that measure the preschool classroom EF environment. The current study addressed this critical gap in the literature by developing a novel measure of the preschool EF environment (the Teacher Report of the Executive Function Environment [TREE]) and testing whether teachers’ scores on the TREE measure were associated with students’ development of school readiness skills. After developing the TREE measure and administering it to a sample of 112 preschool teachers, a three-factor model including subscales of Teacher EF (TEF), Teacher Responsiveness (RES), and Classroom Activities & Procedures (CAP) fit the data best. Using a series of multilevel models, I tested whether teachers’ TREE measure scores (N = 35) were associated with students’ (N = 137) development of school readiness skills across the preschool year. Key findings included a significant, positive association between teachers’ scores on the RES subscale, CAP subscale, and Composite TREE and students’ development of cognitive flexibility. There was also a significant positive association between teachers’ scores on the RES subscale and students’ development of receptive vocabulary skills and a significant negative association between teachers’ scores on the RES subscale and students’ development of early literacy skills. Implications for practice and future directions are discussed.