Examining the Importance of Academic Engagement for Students who have Experienced Maltreatment and the Effect of Environmental and Individual Factors
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Mullins, Casey
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 22, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Carlomagno Panlilio, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Sarah Font, Outside Unit & Field Member
Pui-Wa Lei, Major Field Member
Matthew McCrudden, Major Field Member
Matthew McCrudden, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- child maltreatment
trauma symptoms
academic engagement
emotion regulation
parent-child relationships
trauma-informed research
mediation
moderated mediation - Abstract:
- Students who have experienced maltreatment tend to demonstrate poorer academic outcomes than their non-maltreated peers. The academically-related mechanisms driving these differential outcomes are largely unexplored. Academic engagement, a multidimensional, motivational construct consisting of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions is associated with a myriad of positive academic outcomes and could be an important academically-related mechanism that can be leveraged to improve outcomes for this population. Unfortunately, students who experience maltreatment tend to have difficulty with their engagement. To better understand how to best improve academic outcomes for these students, a deeper dive into engagement is needed, including examining engagement as a mediator that can explain the poor academic outcomes of these students and identifying potential intervention targets by exploring the effect contextual and individual factors have on engagement development. This document attempts to answer these questions by bringing together three related manuscripts. The first paper answered the question of engagement as a mediator in the relationship between experiencing adversity and later academic achievement. The results of paper one suggest that engagement does in fact explain the effect experiencing trauma symptoms has on later academic performance, pointing to engagement as an important mechanism for improving academic outcomes for these students. The second paper examined some of the individual-level factors which may be influencing engagement development for these students. The results of paper two suggest that emotion regulation skills are an important predictor of behavior and emotional engagement and are a potential target of intervention. Finally, the third paper expands on both papers one and two by examining the mediation effect of emotion regulation skills on the effect experiencing adversity and trauma symptoms have on later engagement and by bringing in the effect of contextual-level factors, like parent-child relationships as a moderator on the mediation effect. The results of paper three showed that emotion regulation skills did in fact mediate the effect experiencing trauma symptoms had on later academic engagement, further supporting these skills as a viable intervention target. The results also showed that parent-child relationships did moderate this mediation effect, pointing to the importance of these relationships in emotion regulation skills development and subsequent engagement development and identifying this relationship as a target for intervention. Measurement limitations, implications for trauma-informed school interventions, and future directions are discussed.