Measures for the Study of Maternal Teaching Strategies

Abstract

A technique to measure maternal teaching strat egies was developed for possible use in research and evaluation studies. Scores derived from the technique describe both quality and quantity of be haviors used by mothers to teach cognitive-percep tual tasks to their own young children. The mater nal teaching observation technique (MTOT) yields scores on the following teaching strategy dimen sions : inquiry, directive, praise, negative verbal feedback or disapproval, modeling, visual cue, physical affection, positive physical control, and negative physical control. English and Spanish ver sions of the technique were developed. The tech nique was administered to 83 different mother-child dyads of two sociocultural and language groups, Anglo-American and Chicano. The tasks and procedures were sufficiently engaging and ap pealing, in terms of difficulty level and ability to elicit and to maintain the subjects' attention, for mothers and their 5-year-old children in both groups. Interobserver reliabilities and parallel-form consistency were adequate for both groups, indi cating that each MTOT scale measures a mod erately stable attribute of maternal behavior. Group differences in intercorrelations suggest that con struct invariance might not exist across sociocul tural or language groups.