The overall issue of assessment during early childhood, and its relation to school readiness and other decisions, is currently widely debated. Expanding early childhood education/child care enrollments, better scientific knowledge about early childhood development, and decisions about public spending, all oblige persons working with young children, and their parents, to carefully consider which assessment tools to use, as well as why and when to use them. We need to utilize assessments that yield the most-needed, developmentally grounded information, most economically and most ethically in terms of teacher, parent, and child time, effort, and attention. In particular, better social and emotional assessment tools are sorely needed. The disconnection between the importance of the social and emotional domains of development and their status within educational programming and assessment has long been lamented (Denham, Lydick, Mitchell-Copeland, & Sawyer, 1996). In what appears to be ever-broadening recognition, however, the last several years have witnessed a blossoming of attention to these areas during early childhood, as crucial for both concurrent and later well-being and mental health, as well as learning and academic success. Further, Head Start programs cite emotional-behavior issues among their top needs for training and technical assistance. Similarly, teachers view children's """"""""readiness to learn"""""""" and """"""""teachability"""""""" as marked by positive emotional expressiveness, enthusiasm, and ability to regulate emotions and behaviors . Based on these assertions, we propose to refine and test a battery of preschool social-emotional outcome measures, which tap several constructs central to emotional and social competence theory, specifically emotional expression, emotion regulation, emotion knowledge, social problem solving, and positive and negative social behavior. The overall five-year plan includes piloting of current versions of selected assessment tools, large scale administration and revision of each, as well as psychometric evaluation, initial norming, and examination of the measures' abilities to demonstrate program effects and usefulness in understanding individual children.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
1R01HD051514-01
Application #
7012140
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-RPHB-H (50))
Program Officer
Griffin, James
Project Start
2005-09-30
Project End
2010-08-31
Budget Start
2005-09-30
Budget End
2006-08-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2005
Total Cost
$329,713
Indirect Cost
Name
George Mason University
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
077817450
City
Fairfax
State
VA
Country
United States
Zip Code
22030
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Denham, Susanne A; Bassett, Hideko Hamada; Way, Erin et al. (2014) ""How Would You Feel? What Would You Do?"" Development and Underpinnings of Preschoolers' Social Information Processing. J Res Child Educ 28:182-202
Denham, Susanne A; Kalb, Sara; Way, Erin et al. (2013) Social and emotional information processing in preschoolers: Indicator of early school success? Early Child Dev Care 183:667-688
Denham, Susanne A; Way, Erin; Kalb, Sara C et al. (2013) Preschoolers' social information processing and early school success: the challenging situations task. Br J Dev Psychol 31:180-97
Morris, Carol A S; Denham, Susanne A; Bassett, Hideko H et al. (2013) Relations among Teachers' Emotion Socialization Beliefs and Practices, and Preschoolers' Emotional Competence. Early Educ Dev 24:979-999
Herndon, Kristina J; Bailey, Craig S; Shewark, Elizabeth A et al. (2013) Preschoolers' emotion expression and regulation: relations with school adjustment. J Genet Psychol 174:642-63
Denham, Susanne A; Bassett, Hideko Hamada; Thayer, Sara K et al. (2012) Observing preschoolers' social-emotional behavior: structure, foundations, and prediction of early school success. J Genet Psychol 173:246-78
Denham, Susanne A; Warren-Khot, Heather K; Bassett, Hideko Hamada et al. (2012) Factor structure of self-regulation in preschoolers: testing models of a field-based assessment for predicting early school readiness. J Exp Child Psychol 111:386-404
Denham, Susanne Ayers; Bassett, Hideko Hamada; Way, Erin et al. (2012) Preschoolers' emotion knowledge: self-regulatory foundations, and predictions of early school success. Cogn Emot 26:667-79
Denham, Susanne A; Bassett, Hideko H; Mincic, Melissa et al. (2012) Social-Emotional Learning Profiles of Preschoolers' Early School Success: A Person-Centered Approach. Learn Individ Differ 22:178-189