Transcript Slide 1

Social-Emotionally Competent
Preschoolers Get Ready for School:
What Matters & How Can We Assess It?
Susanne A. Denham
And ASESSR Team
[email protected]
George Mason University
This research was supported by NICHD (R01 HD051514-02)
To Begin: A Center-Time Story
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!
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.
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.
Background for Today’s Talk
• Increasing focus of the search for the socialemotional 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
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 predicts
academic 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
Goals of Our Work: Competence Based
• 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.
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
SUPPORTED AND INDEPENDENT
EMOTION REGULATION
• 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
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
ASPECTS OF SELF-REGULATION
• 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
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.
PSRA FINDINGS
• 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
PRESCHOOLERS’
EMOTION UNDERSTANDING
• Expressions
• Situations
• Causes
• Using Emotion
Language
• Other, More
Sophisticated Skills
AFFECT KNOWLEDGE TEST PART I
(DENHAM, 1986)
Child names and identifies happy, sad, angry,
& scared faces
1. Point to each face:
how does he/she
feel?
2. Can you point to
the _______face?
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 III
NON-STEREOTYPICAL RESPONSES
• 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
Assessor would read opposite of parent survey
Afraid
Happy
answer: Seeing a big although friendly dog.
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.”
AFFECT KNOWLEDGE TEST FINDINGS
• 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
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
MEASURES:
CHALLENGING SITUATIONS TASK (CST)
• 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
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
Hit him back – hard!
Cry
Go do something else
CST FINDINGS
• 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.
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
MINNESOTA PRESCHOOL AFFECT CHECKLIST
(MPAC-R/S)
• 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
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
Minnesota Preschool Affect Checklist
Results
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
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-yearolds; 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.
2.
How do emotion knowledge, self-regulation, emotions,
and social behavior work in concert to predict teacher
reports of early school adjustment?
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
Structural Model of Preschoolers’ Social-Emotional
Competence/ Self-Regulation and Their School Adjustment
Cool EF
.15*
Compliance
Hot EF
.36*
.28*
.14*
.29*
AKT
Negative
Recognition
Teacher
Reports of
School
Adjustment
-.22*
.35*
-.13+
.12*
AKT
Emotion
Situations
.18*
-.24*
Negative
Emotion/
Aggression
Social
Behavior
0.8
Mean Z Scores
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
Cluster SEL Risk
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
-0.8
-1
1
Mean Z Scores
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
Cluster SEL Risk
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
-0.8
-1
Cluster SEL
CompetentSocial/Expressive
1
Mean Z Score
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
SEL Risk
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
-0.8
-1
SEL CompetentSocial/Expressive
SEL CompetentRestrained
Contextual Issues
• 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
Conclusions & Future Plans
• Emotion knowledge, Self Regulation, and SocialEmotional Behavior are working in concert
• Indirect and Direct prediction of early school
adjustment
• Future plans
• Computerizing measures
• Examining teacher contribution to social-emotional
competence
REFERENCES
Bassett, 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.