Game-based assessment of socioemotional skills of preschool and early primary school students: Design and piloting of a tablet app

• In Event: Innovative and contextually relevant measurement instruments to enhance Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) monitoring and evaluation processes

Proposal

There is a large body of empirical evidence that has linked higher children’s socioemotional learning (SEL) skills to a variety of positive outcomes (eg., Durlak et al., 2011; Taylor et al, 2017). While most of this evidence has been generated in high-resource contexts, newer studies show that children’s SEL skills could also help children deal with the adverse physiological and psychological effects of being exposed to the risk factors that come with living through emergencies (Torrente et al., 2019). Based on this evidence, the Ministry of Education of Colombia has implemented since 2003 the national program for the promotion of citizenship competencies, which includes, among other initiatives: 1) National Standards of Citizenship Competencies which state the skills, attitudes and knowledge expected to be learned by students in all public and private schools; and 2) a national test which seeks to measure how much students from 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th grades are actually reaching those standards, throughout the country (Chaux, 2009). Several of the citizenship competencies defined in the standards and measured in the national tests are social and emotional skills (Bustamante et al., 2020). While important progress has been made in large-scale measurement of SEL skills in Colombia, current instruments rely mainly on self-report measures, which are limited by social desirability and by the impossibility of assessing younger children. To overcome these limitations, this study was aimed at developing a game-based instrument that could facilitate direct assessment of SEL skills in preschool and early primary school students.

With the increasing use of user-friendly mobile technologies (eg., touchscreen tablets) by young children, important efforts have been made to develop technology-based assessments of children’s abilities (Csapó, Molnár, & Nagy, 2014; Neumann & Neumann, 2019; Semmelmann et al. 2016). Game-based assessments provide important advantages for measurement of children’s abilities; for example, they do not require trained investigators, and they may enhance children’s engagement in the evaluation activities. Previous research conducted with preschoolers have provided some support for the validity and reliability of game-based assessments to measure children’s abilities such as literacy skills (Neumann & Neumann, 2019), and school readiness (Amukune et al., 2022). In line with this, the study from this paper set out to design and pilot a game-based assessment procedure to test socioemotional skills in 6 to 9 years old students from different regions and socioeconomic backgrounds in Colombia. The presentation of this study will focus on the description of the design process, and on the results of the instruments piloting, conducted with 6 and 9 years old children via qualitative cognitive interviews.

Authors

• Enrique Chaux, Universidad de los Andes

• Ana M. Velasquez, Universidad de los Andes