Social-Emotionally Competent Preschoolers Get Ready for

School: What Matters & How Can We

Assess It?

Susanne A. DenhamAnd ASESSR Team

sdenham@gmu.edu

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

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Cluster SEL Risk

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-0.8

-0.6

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Cluster SEL Risk

Cluster SEL Compe-tent-Social/Expres-sive

Me

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-0.8

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SEL Risk

SEL Compe-tent-Social/Expressive

SEL Compe-tent-Restrained

Me

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• 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.