Activity settings and attributed social disadvantage as influencing factors on teacher–child interaction quality in central Germany

In Germany, there is still a great need for research on the quality of teacher-child interactions in ECEC institutions. Especially, because social interactions and relationships are crucial for (early) learning and development (Ulferts et al., 2019). However, there are hardly any results on factors influencing the interaction quality. This paper addresses the issue by assessing interaction quality of 48 ECEC teachers in German Kindergartens using the CLASS (Pianta et al., 2008). The influences of two factors - the activity setting and the attributed social disadvantage on the child - are explored. Interaction quality analyses show mid to high quality scores for Emotional Support and Classroom Organization whereas the Instructional Support domain is rated low. Concerning the influencing factors, we find significant differences in interaction quality between the activity settings and significantly higher Instructional Support scores for the dyads with the child with an attributed social disadvantage.