Investigating Differences in How Parents and Teachers Rate Students' Self-Control

Public Significance Statement Development of students' social-emotional competencies is important to academic and life outcomes. Data on students' social-emotional development frequently come from parents and teachers, oftentimes separately. In this study, we find that teacher and parent agreement on students' self-control is low-raising questions about related findings-and that some of the difference in how parents and teachers view kids is associated with factors like whether the student is Black. Supporting students' social-emotional learning (SEL) is gaining emphasis in education. In particular, self-control is a construct that has been shown to predict academic outcomes, though much debate on this point exists. Although largely unexamined, inconsistent findings could stem from the fact that related surveys are often scored by multiple raters (e.g., teachers and parents), especially when administered at a young age when students cannot respond to items themselves. Yet little is known about (a) how much parent and teacher self-control ratings overlap and (b) what student characteristics like race and socioeconomic status are associated with inconsistencies. In this study, we use data from a widely used measure of early self-control with parent and teacher forms. We use these data to examine the impact of rater discrepancies on our understanding of students' self-control. Results show relatively low agreement between parents and teachers, with some evidence that discrepancies are associated with student race.