Study Grapples With How to Assess Social-Emotional Skills

This is the second of two posts exploring new research presented at the bi-annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. In April, blog readers voted on which studies they would like to learn more about. The research described below received the second-highest number of votes. In a previous post, we wrote about the research that received the most votes – a study connecting data on kindergartners’ brain skills with the impact of maternal care-giving in infancy.

Educators have been saying for years that the children who have a positive experience in kindergarten are those who arrive with the ability to get along with their peers, keep their emotions in check and persist in the face of challenging assignments. But it’s not always easy to determine whether a preschool-aged child possesses those skills or can show they are learning them. 

In the past few years, however, new research is providing some hints. Among the most recent studies is one presented this spring at the bi-annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development by Susanne Denham, a professor of psychology at George Mason University.

Denham and her research team have been testing what types of instruments would be most reliable for assessing children’s abilities as a way of gathering data on which children may need additional support in childcare, preschool and elementary school. 

“We know social-emotional abilities are important,” Denham said in an interview this spring. “How do we assess them in the classroom?”

Denham’s research is supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Development and is part of a national consortium of researchers seeking the best ways to measure children’s abilities before entering school and the best ways to identify which kinds of pre-kindergarten and childcare programs will help to develop those abilities.  Last fall, Denham was among the authors of a comprehensive 134-page compendium of tools that have been used to evaluate children’s social-emotional learning in preschool and childcare classrooms as well as elementary schools.

In the study described at the SRCD meeting this spring, Denham had at least two goals: She wanted to learn more about the links between preschoolers’ social development and their success in school during their kindergarten year.  She also wanted to test a shortened version of an observation instrument called the Minnesota Preschool Affect Checklist (MPAC), which asks teachers to observe how children play with their peers, control their emotions and stay focused on various projects and activities.  Teachers using the MPAC write down what they see in 5-minute intervals across four days.  The original instrument contained 66 aspects of behavior for teachers to consider; the new one contained 18.

To determine whether the shortened MPAC was reliable, Denham and her colleagues tested it with more than 350 children in private childcare centers and Head Start centers in Virginia.  They gathered data on those children using MPAC scores and several other assessments, such as the Affect Knowledge Test and Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment, and compared the scores among the various tests to evaluate the new version’s consistency and reliability. 

Denham’s finding: Yes, a shortened version of the MPAC could be a good, if not a better, substitute for the original tool.

Other results from the study contribute to the growing pile of evidence linking a child’s social-emotional abilities to later success in school. For example, Denham found that children who expressed negative emotions and behaved aggressively were less likely to be reported by their kindergarten teachers as doing well.

Being able to identify emotions emerged as a key indicator of a child’s development in building the positive relationships that appear to lead to success in kindergarten. The George Mason researchers found that if children scored well in recognizing angry or sad expressions or body language, they were more likely, months later, to behave positively with other children. 

This particular study was not designed to determine whether children could be taught to recognize emotions, but other studies, Denham said, have shown that children may gain from curricula and activities that help them recognize various emotions – such as using picture books and puppets to demonstrate anger, sadness or disappointment.

In this study, Denham said, researchers did pick up differences between the children who attended Head Start centers where teachers had been implementing those kinds of activities and the children who attended private preschools and childcare centers where it was not clear whether teachers were doing so or not.

“The children we felt were more at-risk – the Head Start children – they were more pro-social,” Denham said. “And what we think is going on there is that they have this really wonderful programming and their teachers are being helped to make their classrooms very organized.”

The results are due to be published in a forthcoming issue of The Journal of Genetic Psychology.