About PREP

The Preschool Relationships Enhancement Project (PREP) is a large-scale intervention study based at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. The project explores how strong, sensitive, and supportive teacher-child relationships help children develop important school readiness skills.
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Challenging behaviors, such as having trouble sharing toys, struggling to keep hands to self, or having difficulty following classroom rules, are relatively common among 3- and 4-year-old children, but can make it hard for children to develop strong relationships with their teachers.
It is common in early childhood classrooms for children to display challenging or hard-to-manage behaviors, such as having trouble sharing toys, struggling to keep  hands to self, or having difficulty following classroom rules. However, these behaviors can make it hard for teachers to connect with children in ways that are individually supportive and responsive to their needs during the school day: when children display high levels of hard-to-manage behaviors, teachers are less likely to develop a sensitive, warm, and supportive relationship with them. Meanwhile, high-quality teacher-child relationships are linked to children’s ability to develop important school readiness skills—both academic and social-emotional. Thus, a responsive, warm and close bond with one’s teacher is especially helpful for children who display challenging behaviors.
The purpose of PREP is to examine an intervention called Banking Time. In Banking Time, teachers engage in brief interactions with a single child, conveying messages of sensitivity, predictability, encouragement, and support for exploration. We call the intervention Banking Time because teachers serve as a valuable resource to children and a teacher can invest in this relationship with a child. Teacher and children will later draw upon this relationship capital to help cope with and solve common classroom challenges (e.g., work on a frustrating task, deal with peer conflicts). 
Our recent preliminary research shows that teachers who completed the Banking Time intervention with specific children in their classroom developed a more positive relationship with those children and that the children displayed fewer challenging classroom behaviors compared to teachers and children who did not participate in Banking Time.

For more information about this research, see our Research & Opportunities page.

Contact Information

Address:
Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning
Curry School of Education
University of Virginia
350 Old Ivy Way, Suite 100
Charlottesville, VA 22903

Phone: 866-301-8278 ext. 1
    or 434-982-5362
Fax: 434-243-5480
Email:  uva.preproject@gmail.com

Research Affiliates

PREP in the News