social-emotionally competent preschoolers get ready for school: what matters & how can we assess...
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Social-Emotionally Competent Preschoolers Get Ready for
School: What Matters & How Can We
Assess It?
Susanne A. DenhamAnd ASESSR Team
George Mason University
This research was supported by NICHD (R01 HD051514-02)
Robbie moves the fire engine to the spot that Jamila points to—they are ready to rescue the people from that fire!! But then things get complicated, changing fast, as interaction often does.
4-year-olds Robbie and Jamila are pretending to be firefighters. They have firefighters’ hats and boots, a ride-on fire engine, a plush firehouse dog, and cots to lie on until someone rings the big bell to say “Fire, Fire!”. They are having fun!
Jamila suddenly decides that she should be the driver, and tries to pull Robbie off its seat. At the same time, Tyrone, hovering nearby, runs over and whines to join in.
But Robbie, almost falling off the fire engine, doesn’t want Tyrone to join –he’s too much of a baby. At the same time, Jamila trips over a cot, falls down, and starts to cry. And just then Tomas, the class bully, approaches, laughing at four-year-olds making believe and crying.
To Begin: A Center-Time Story
• Increasing focus of the search for the social-emotional side of “what matters” in early school readiness (social competence, classroom adjustment, and academic achievement):• Emotional competence
(understanding, expressing, regulating)
• Self-regulation• Social problem-solving• Social skills
• Emotional competence, self regulation, social problem-solving, and social skills work in concert to support school readiness
Background for Today’s Talk
Why We Care
Children without age appropriate emotional/social skills
• Participate less in class• Less accepted by classmates/teachers• Get fewer instructions/positive feedback from
teachers• Like school less and less
Social-Emotional competence predictsacademic success in 1st grade, even considering intelligence/family background
Why We Care
This pattern persists. Aggressive/antisocial children are more likely to:
• Perform poorly on academic tasks • Be held back in later grades• Drop out later on• Continue antisocial behavior
Necessary to pinpoint social-emotional strengths as well as weaknesses. Crucial to insuring long-term well-being and academic success (Raver & Knitzer, 2002).
Use assessment to track children’s progress, show programming results
GOALS OF TODAY’S TALK
• Describe milestones and abilities of social-emotional competence and self-regulation, and for each:
• Offer assessment tools we have created or adapted in our work – direct assessment and observation of children
• Enumerate how information from these tools, and others, is related to children’s school readiness, broadly defined
• Suggest other assessment possibilities• Finally, share some findings with our
assessment tools regarding prediction of school readiness
• Creation of “sturdy” assessment tools and specific findings from them regarding early adjustment to, and success in, school settings:• Emotional Competence• Self-Regulation• Social problem-solving• Social behavior
• Related to young children’s classroom adjustment, learning behaviors, and preacademic functioning (Denham, Brown, & Domitrovich, 2010) – in all the above areas, to recap:• When children can engage in sustained,
positive interactions with peers in the learning environment. and respond in a regulated way to the other demands of the learning environment, they are better equipped to learn.
Goals of Our Work: Competence Based
EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE
• EXPRESSIVENESS
• REGULATING, AND COPING WITH, EMOTIONS (also cognitions and behavior)
• EMOTION KNOWLEDGE
• For each, means of assessing and findings of relations with early school success
EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVENESS
• BASIC EMOTIONS
• BLENDS
• “SOCIAL” EMOTIONS
• STABILITY
• VOLUNTARY MANAGEMENT
• Adult support often needed • Redeploying attention• Changing the situation/• solving the problem• Emotion language
• Children increasingly use independent Emotion Regulation
strategies• Instrumental and some cognitive• Connect these strategies with
results• Self-distract, approach or retreat,
symbolic play
SUPPORTED AND INDEPENDENT EMOTION REGULATION
EXPRESSIVENESS & EMOTION REGULATION: FINDINGS
• Negative expressiveness negatively related to Head Start children’s attitudes toward learning and persistence (Miller et al., 2006)
• Emotion regulation – emotional flexibility, equanimity, and contextual appropriateness of their emotional expression –predicted children’s later classroom adjustment (Shields et al., 2001; see also Miller et al.)
• Emotion regulation, assessed using the same rating scale as Shields et al., but also including a series of frustration tasks, predicted kindergarten achievement (Howse et al., 2003).
OTHER WAYS TO ASSESS EXPRESSIVENESS AND EMOTION
REGULATION• Battelle Developmental Inventory (Newborg,
2005)• Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (Lebuffe
& Naglieri, 1999)• Penn Interactive Preschool Play Scales
(McDermott et al., 2002)• Behavior Assessment for Children, 2nd Edition
(BASC-2, Reynolds & Kamphaus, 1998)• Rothbart temperament scales• Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Shields &
Cicchetti, 1997)• RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
• COMPENDIUM WWW.CASEL.ORG
• Also NICHD’s National Children’s Study
• Cool Executive Function• “…intentionally or deliberately hold information in mind,
manage and integrate information, and resolve conflict/competition between stimulus representations and response options” (Blair & Urshache, in press). • e.g., pays attention during instructions and
demonstrations; sustains concentration, working memory
• “Hot” Executive Function• ability to suppress a dominant response and enact a less
automatic, but more adaptive, response to attain a goal in a given situation, often appetitive• e.g., refrains from indiscriminately touching test
materials; lets examiner finish before starting task
• Compliance• Social Behavior—arguably is or is not part of self-
regulation• Developmentally appropriate task• e.g., cooperates; complies with assessor’s requests
ASPECTS OF SELF-REGULATION
PRESCHOOL SELF-REGULATION ASSESSMENT (PSRA)
Smith-Donald, Raver et al. (2007)
• Balance Beam/Walk the Line • – regular plus 2 “SLOW” trials
• Pencil Tap -- “I tap 2 times, you tap 1 time”
• Tower Turns• Gift Wrap (Peek) and Gift Wait, Toy
Return• Snack Delay• Tongue Task• Tower Clean Up• Toy Sorting
PSRA COMPLIANCE TASK
“We can’t play right now, but please clean up this mess and put the toys where they go. See, the
cars go in here, the dinosaurs go in here, the bugs go in here, and the beads go in here.”
Child is timed: when does clean up begin? How long does clean up take? Does child play with
toys?
PSRA COOL EF TASK
“Ok, now we’re going to play a game with these blocks; we can build a tower.” “We’ll take turns adding blocks to the tower. First you put one on, and then I’ll put one on, and then you put one on and I’ll put one on. That’s how we take turns and that’s how we play this game.”
Keep track of whether child takes turns, engages assessor, etc.
• New measure – found not easy to get to emotion regulation!• Ratings of positive engagement, confidence, &
positive emotion• Ratings of emotion regulation overall• Predict Head Start children’s approaches to
learning, social behavior, and achievement over time
• Non-emotion-related results are moderately related to teachers’ ratings of externalizing problems (Smith-Donald et al., 2007)
• Aspects of Hot EF and Cool EF related to • Early school success – attitudes toward learning,
social competence• Emotion knowledge (bi-directional but tends to
be predictive)• Other ways to assess: Clancy Blair, Stephanie
Carlson, Adele Diamond
PSRA FINDINGS
PRESCHOOLERS’ EMOTION UNDERSTANDING
• Expressions
• Situations
• Causes
• Using Emotion
Language
• Other, More
Sophisticated
Skills
AFFECT KNOWLEDGE TEST PART I (DENHAM, 1986)
1.Point to each face: how does he/she feel?
2. Can you point to the _______face?
Child names and identifies happy, sad, angry, & scared faces
AFFECT KNOWLEDGE TEST PART II
• Assessor acts out emotional situations with puppets, asks child to place a face on the puppet showing what the puppet “feels”. Unequivocal.
• “Hi! I’m Nancy/Johnny. Here is my brother/sister. Ah! She/he gave me some ice cream. YUM, YUM!!” (Assessor acts HAPPY). “Show me how Nancy/ Johnny feels!”
AFFECT KNOWLEDGE TEST PART IIINON-STEREOTYPICAL RESPONSES
Seeing a big although friendly dog. Afraid
Assessor would read opposite of parent survey answer:
SCARED: Nancy/Johnny: “Here comes a big dog!! He looks mean; his teeth are big.”
HAPPY: Nancy/Johnny: “Here comes a big dog He looks nice; his big teeth are smiling at me.”
• Assessor acts out ambiguous situation, where the child feels differently than the puppet.
• Based on Parent Questionnaire answers. • Items pit positive and negative or two
negative Happy
• Requires little verbalization, quick, and fun.
• Scores related to other tests of social-emotional competence since 1986 by myself and many others
• Supported by self-regulation as assessed by PSRA
• Predicts concurrent and later attitudes toward learning, classroom adjustment, and kindergarten achievement
• Help teachers understand child’s emotion knowledge• Prognosticate about skills related to measure,
track learning over time
AFFECT KNOWLEDGE TEST FINDINGS
OTHER EMOTION KNOWLEDGE FINDINGS
• Emotion knowledge related to preschoolers’ classroom adjustment and academic achievement (Garner & Waajid, 2008 for low-income preschoolers; see also Leerkes et al., 2008, Shields et al.)
• 5-year-olds’ emotion knowledge predicted both their age 9 social and academic competence (Izard et al., 2001)
OTHER WAYS TO ASSESS EMOTION KNOWLEDGE
• Kusché Emotions Inventory (Kusché, 1984) – assesses children’s ability to recognize emotion language, concepts, and visual cues via drawings indicating facial expression, body posture, and situations. • Happy, sad, mad, and scared, as well as the more
complex emotions of confused, love, surprised, proud, disappointed, embarrassed, and tired
• Garner et al. (1994) line drawings of situations. Anger perception bias also scored
• Emotions Matching Task (Morgan, Izard, et al., 2009) • brightly colored photographs of ethnically diverse
children making facial expressions of happiness,sadness, anger, fear/surprise, and ‘neutral
SOCIAL PROBLEM SOLVING:RESPONSIBLE DECISION
MAKING
•Analyze social situations –– ENCODE & INTERPRET
•Set goals–CLARIFICATION OF GOALS
•Figure out effective ways to solve differences between self & others
– RESPONSE GENERATION, EVALUATION, & DECISION
•Alternative solution generation•Means-Ends thinking•Consequential thinking
• Assesses children’s social perceptions of the emotions and behavior of their peers.
• Asks child to make decisions about difficult peer situations: entry into play and peer provocation
• Focuses on how they feel, what they would do.
• Shows cards with choices of feelings/situations for child to choose
MEASURES:
CHALLENGING SITUATIONS TASK (CST)
CHALLENGING SITUATIONS TASK (CST)
You are playing on the playground in the sandbox. Your playmate suddenly hits you
CHALLENGING SITUATIONS TASK – HOW DO YOU FEEL?
HAPPY ANGRY
SAD JUST OK
CHALLENGING SITUATION TASK– WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
Tell him not to do that; suggest solution Cry
Hit him back – hard! Go do something else
• OUR RESULTS:• Choices related to level of emotion knowledge, Cool
EF, and teacher/peer ratings of classroom social-emotional behavior, as well as school success• Sad and Prosocial choices related to early school
success. • Happy negatively related
• OTHERS’ RESULTS:• Children at risk for behavior problems were not
likely to make prosocial choices; boys with diagnosable behavior problems were 2x as likely to choose aggressive solutions.
• Head Start preschoolers’ competent and inept behavioral choices related to concurrent emotion knowledge, and to end-of-year vocabulary and literacy.
CST FINDINGS
OTHER WAYS TO ASSESS SOCIAL PROBLEM-SOLVING
• Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS; Gresham & Elliot)
• Preschool Interpersonal Problem-Solving measure (PIPS) (Shure, 1982)• Asks children to generate as many
alternative solutions as possible to specific problems
• What Happens Next Game (WHNG; Shure) asks children to consider the consequences of various solutions.
• Observational means (Krasnor & Rubin, 1983; Sharp, 1981).
OTHER POSITIVE BEHAVIOR:
RELATIONSHIP SKILLS•Positive overtures to play
•Initiating and maintaining conversation
•Negotiation
•Saying “no”
•Seeking help
•Cooperating
•Sharing
•Taking turns
• Sroufe et al. (1984); Denham et al. (1991); Denham & Burton (1996)
• Observational measure of social-emotional competence in free play
• “Live” Coding – 4 5-minute observations• Emotional expressiveness
• Positive & Negative• Emotion Regulation
• Positive & Negative• Involvement in play
• Productive and Unproductive• Social behavior
• Peer skill and prosocial behavior
MINNESOTA PRESCHOOL AFFECT CHECKLIST (MPAC-R/S)
MPAC-R/S Example Items
MPAC Scales Exemplars of behaviors observed
Expression and regulation of positive emotion
Displays positive emotion in any manner--facial, vocal, bodily
Expression and regulation of negative emotion
Uses negative emotion to during social interaction with someone; uses face or voice to show negative emotion
Productive involvement in purposeful activity
Engrossed, absorbed, intensely involved in activity; involved in an activity that the child organizes for himself
Unproductive, unfocused use of personal energy
Vacant; listless
Lapses in impulse control Physical or verbal interpersonal aggression
Positive management of frustration Promptly expresses, in words, feelings arising from problem situation, then moves on
Skills in peer leading and joining Smoothly approaches an already ongoing activity
Prosocial response to needs of others
Shares, helps, takes turns
Shortened version – three mega-factors, 18 items• Negative emotion/aggression• Positive emotion/involvement• Prosocial behavior/peer skill
• Emotionally negative/Aggressive predicts • Classroom adjustment, attitudes toward
learning, and social competence both in preschool and kindergarten
• Kindergarten academic aggregate• Sometimes especially for boys• Especially when not supported by self-
regulation and emotion knowledge (which are negatively correlated)
• Emotionally regulated/prosocial related to emotion knowledge
Minnesota Preschool Affect Checklist
Results
OTHER RELATIONSHIP SKILLS FINDINGS
• Bierman et al. (2008): Children high in aggression and low in prosocial behavior had the biggest deficits in school adjustment problems (e.g., not following rules and routines, lacking enthusiasm about learning). • Only prosocial deficits (not in combination with
aggression) negatively predicted academic achievement.
• Kindergartners’ prosocial behavior predicts their 1st grade self-regulation, which then predicts 1st grade achievement (Normandeau & Guay, 1998)
• Many findings with older children even suggesting predicting academic success more powerfully than earlier academic success!! (Caprara et al., 2000)
OTHER WAYS TO ASSESS RELATIONSHIP SKILLS
• SSIS• Behavioral and Emotional Rating 2nd Edition (Epstein & Sharma, 1998)
TEACHER MEASURES
PRESCHOOL LEARNING BEHAVIOR SCALE
McDermott, Fantuzzo, et al.
• Assesses preschoolers’ approach to learning
• 3 dimensions: • Competence Motivation
• E.g.: Says task is too hard without effort
• Attention/Persistence• E.g.: Doesn’t stay w/activity for age appropriate time
• Attitude Toward Learning• E.g.: Aggressive or hostile when frustrated
TEACHER MEASURES
TEACHER RATING SCALE OF EARLY SCHOOL ADJUSTMENT Ladd et al.
• 5 subscales measure child’s behavioral/relational adjustment to school
• Two used here:• Independent participation (e.g.,
“Approaches new activities with enthusiasm”)
• Cooperative participation (e.g., “Aware of classroom rules”)
TEACHER MEASURES
SOCIAL COMPETENCE BEHAVIORAL EVALUATION LaFreniere & Dumas (1996)
• Sensitive/Cooperative• Comforts or assists children in difficulty,
Takes other children’s viewpoint into account
• Angry/Aggressive• Easily frustrated; Defiant when
reprimanded • Anxious/Withdrawn
• Remains apart, isolated from the group; Sad, unhappy, depressed
• Related to aspects of emotional competence in earlier research: • Emotion knowledge, observed emotion (e.g.,
Denham et al., 2003)
THE PRESENT STUDIES
Study 1, Variable-Centered: Measures administered at the middle of the academic year to 3- and 4-year-olds; teacher measures at end of same academic year
Study 2, Person-Centered: Data when measures administered to 4-year-olds only; teacher measures about 4 months later (same sample, combined waves 1 and 3)
Questions to be asked:1. How do emotion knowledge, self-
regulation, emotions, and social behavior work in concert to predict teacher reports of early school adjustment?
2. Are there important aspects of context that impact these issues?
Study Details
Study 1 n = 326 Study 2 n = 275 About half boys Children attended
Head Start program in a small Virginia city and rural area
Private child care in nearby suburban and semi-rural areas
AKT Negative
Recognition
AKT Emotion
Situations
Cool EF Hot EF Compliance
Negative Emotion/
Aggression
Social Behavior
Teacher Reports of
School Adjustment
.15*.36*
.29*
-.13+
-.24*
-.22*.14*
.28*
.18*
.35*
.12*
Structural Model of Preschoolers’ Social-Emotional Competence/ Self-Regulation and Their School
Adjustment
-1
-0.8
-0.6
-0.4
-0.2
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
Cluster SEL Risk
Me
an
Z S
co
res
-1
-0.8
-0.6
-0.4
-0.2
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
Cluster SEL Risk
Cluster SEL Compe-tent-Social/Expres-sive
Me
an
Z S
co
res
-1
-0.8
-0.6
-0.4
-0.2
0
0.2
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0.6
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1
SEL Risk
SEL Compe-tent-Social/Expressive
SEL Compe-tent-Restrained
Me
an
Z S
co
re
• Study 1:• No evidence of moderation or moderated
mediation by center type/risk status – main effect favoring Head Start on social behavior and on teacher ratings of school adjustment• Concern about potential method/rater
variance regarding BUT:• Head Start
• Anecdotally more structured, often less chaotic, “Al’s Pals”
• Study 2:• Boys, low income site over-represented in
SEL Risk group• Girls over-represented in SEL Competent-
Restrained Group
Contextual Issues
Conclusions & Future Plans
• Emotion knowledge, Self Regulation, and Social-Emotional Behavior are working in concert• Indirect and Direct prediction of early
school adjustment
• Future plans• Computerizing measures• Examining teacher contribution to
social-emotional competence
REFERENCESBassett, H. H., Denham, S. A. & Warren-Khot, H. K. (under revision). Stability and Changes of Young Children’s Self-Regulation: Properties of the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment (PSRA).Denham, S. A., Bassett, H. H., Way, E., Kalb, S. C., Warren-Khot, H. K., & Zinsser, K. (under review).
“How would you feel? What would you do?” Properties of the Challenging Situations Task. Denham, S. A., Kalb, S. C., Way, E., Warren-Khot, H. K., Rhoades, B. L, & Bassett, H. H (under review).
Emotion-related and social-cognitive problem solving in preschoolers: Indicator of early school readiness? Denham, S. A., Way, E., Kalb, S. C., Warren-Khot, H. K., & Bassett, H. H. (under review).
Preschoolers' social information processing and school readiness: Validity of Challenging Situations Task. Bassett, H. H., Denham, S. A., Mincic, M. M., & Graling, K. (accepted).
The structure of preschoolers' emotion knowledge: Model equivalence and validity using an SEM approach.
Early Education and Development.Denham, S. A., Bassett, H. H., Kalb, S. C., Mincic, M., Segal, Y., & Zinsser, K. (in press).
Observing preschoolers’ social-emotional behavior: Structure, foundations, and prediction of early school
success. Journal of Genetic Psychology.Denham, S. A. Bassett, H. H., Mincic, M.M., Kalb, S. C., Way, E., Wyatt, T., & Segal, Y. (in press).
Social-emotional learning profiles of preschoolers' early school success: A person-centered approach.
Learning and Individual Differences. Special issue on Emotions in the Classroom. Denham, S. A., Bassett, H. H., Way, E., Mincic, M., Zinsser, K., & Graling, K. (in press).
Preschoolers’ emotion knowledge: Self-regulatory foundations, and predictions of early school success.
Cognition and Emotion.Denham, S. A., Warren-Khot, H. K., & Bassett, H. H., Wyatt, T., & Perna, A. (accepted).
Factor structure of self-regulation in preschoolers: Testing models of a field-based assessment for predicting early
school readiness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Denham, S. A., Zinsser, K.M, & Brown, C. A. (in press). The emotional basis of learning and development in early childhood
education. In B. Spodek & O. Saracho (Eds.), Handbook of research on the
education of young children (3nd Ed.). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.