Timothy W Curby

Chair

Professor

Applied Developmental Psychology: Emotion-focused teaching; Early childhood education; Classroom quality and teacher–student interactions; Quantitative Methods.

Dr. Curby’s work focuses on early childhood classroom experiences and applying advanced statistical models to school-based research. Specifically, he focuses on the interactions that teachers have with children as a mechanism for children’s development. Dr. Curby is also interested in measurement of classrooms and development of observational measures of the classroom environment. More information about his work is available on the Development In School Contexts (DISC) lab website

Current Research

An Alternative Licensure Program for Preschool Teachers in Chicago

With support from the Department of Education, we are working with a group of residents taking part in the University of Illinois at Chicago's Alternative Licensure Program. We aim to support teachers in their support for (a) children's developing emotional competence, (b) STEM learning, and (c) diverse learners. In particular, we plan to use the EMOTERS measure in the context of coaching and professional learning communities to assist in the professional development of residents.

Development and Preliminary Validation of the Emotion Teaching Rating Scale (EMOTERS) for Preschool Classrooms

Teachers frequently model emotions, respond to children's emotions, and instruct about emotions. With grant funding from the Institute of Education Sciences and in conjunction with Dr. Katherine Zinsser at the University of Illinois at Chicago, we developed an observational measure of emotion-focused teaching. The five-year study has produced a measure for use in preschool classrooms that ranks the various interactions from the least difficult to the most difficult making it clear what teachers can do to improve. The measure is freely available through a creative commons license (https://www.emoters.org/).

Selected Publications

* denotes GMU student researcher

Curby, T. W., Zinsser, K., Main. C., & Skourletos, J. (2024). Changes in Observed and Self-reported Emotion-Focused Teaching: Coaching in the Context of an Early Childhood Alternative Licensure Program. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sel.2024.100059

Zinsser, K. M., Curby, T. W., Gordon., R., & Moberg, S. (2023). A unidimensional model of emotion-focused teaching in early childhood. Learning Environments Research, 26(3), 933-949. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-023-09461-1

Loomis, A. M., Curby, T. W., & Zinsser, K. M. (2023). Beyond the behavior: Teachers’ trauma-informed attitudes mitigate expulsion risk among uninhibited preschoolers. Children & Youth Services Review, 145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2023.106806

Fatahi., N.*, Park., C., Curby, T. W., Zinsser, K. M., Denham, S. A., Moberg, S., & Gordon., R. (2022). Promoting preschoolers' social and emotional competencies through emotion-focused teaching. Early Education and Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2022.2133319

Fatahi, N.*, Winsler, A., & Curby, T. W. (in press). Pre-K teacher emotion socialization and children's emotional competence. Early Child Development and Care. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2022.2074980

Curby, T. W., Zinsser, K. M., Gordon, R., Ponce, E., Syed, G.*, & Peng, F. (2022). Emotion-focused teaching practices and preschool children's social and learning behaviors. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000988

Gordon, R., Peng, F., Curby, T. W., & Zinsser, K. M. (2021). Using the many-facet Rasch model to improve observational quality measures: An introduction and application to measuring the teaching of emotion skills. Manuscript prepared for a special Issue on Measuring Quality in Early Childhood Education: Past, Present, and Future, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 55, 149-164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2020.11.005

Curby, T. W. (2020). Creating successful early learning environments. In V. C. Alfonso and G. J. DuPaul's (Eds.) Healthy development in young children: Evidence-based interventions for early education. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Curby, T. W., McKnight, P., Alexander, L., Erchov, S. (2019). Sources of variance in end-of-course student evaluations. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. doi:10.1080/02602938.2019.1607249

Curby, T. W., Berke, E., Alfonso, V., Blake, J. J., DeMarie, D., DuPaul, G. J., Flores, R., Hess, R. S., Howard, K. A. S., Lepore, J. C. C., Subotnik, R. F. (2018). Transition practices into kindergarten and the barriers teachers encounter. In A. Mashburn, J. LoCasale-Crouch, and K. Pears' (Eds.) Kindergarten Transition and Readiness: Promoting Cognitive, Social-Emotional, and Self-Regulatory Development. Springer.

Grants and Fellowships

In Progress

US Department of Education (University of Illinois at Chicago). The Chicago Early Childhood Preparation and Pathway (CECPP) Partnership. PI: C. Main. Role: Co-Principal Investigator. 2019-2024.

National Institutes of Health. Efficacy and neurobiological mechanisms of a parent-focused mindfulness intervention to prevent adolescent substance use. PI: T. Chaplin. Role: Statistician. 2021-2026.

National Institutes of Health. Parent-adolescent interactions, gender, and substance use: Brain mechanisms. PI T. Chaplin. Role: Statistician. 2018-2023.