Poster #194 - Interpersonal Skills and Academic Achievement in 4K

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

The development of social skills is critical for academic achievement throughout the school years (Bransford et al., 2000; Wentzel, 1991). In early childhood education programs, such skills are measured almost exclusively through teacher or parent report. At the same time, the research literature contains a number of tasks that purport to assess key aspects of social cognitive development. In our project, we ask whether performance on such direct assessments can provide useful information about individual differences in social skills and school achievement.

Children enrolled in 4K programs in four schools (N=95, 4–5 years) completed 13 different measures of social and cognitive skills. Teachers predicted how each child would perform on each task, and we obtained official report card grades from teachers as well. Here, we will focus on two research questions: 1. Can teachers accurately predict children’s performance on social and cognitive tasks? 2. Which tasks are the best predictors of children’s grades?

To address the first research question, we conducted a principal components analysis on children’s task performance and teachers’ predictions of children’s task performance. We retained components that had an eigenvalue over 1.00. Children’s performance revealed four components reflecting: (1) social attention tasks (21% of variance); (2) school attitudes (12% of variance); (3) tracking information (10% of variance); and (4) interpreting others’ actions (10% of variance). In contrast, teachers’ predictions only revealed one principal component with all 13 predictions loading together (51% of variance). These results reveal that teachers provided a global evaluation of children’s social and cognitive skills rather than separately evaluating individual skills (Thorndike, 1920). The increased variability in children’s scores compared to teachers’ ratings provides evidence that children’s skills across various domains are more varied than teachers perceive.

To evaluate our second research question, we extracted the four components identified from children’s task scores and regressed teachers’ grades on all of the components simultaneously to control for other components. Children’s grades were primarily predicted by their scores on social attention tasks (t(90)=5.42, p<.001, p2=.25); the social attention component included measures of categorization along multiple dimensions, theory of mind, and identification of social affiliation cues. Children’s grades were also significantly predicted by school attitudes (t(90)=2.00, p<.05, p2=.04); the school attitudes component asked children how much they like school and how many friends they have at school.

Together, these findings reveal that measures of social cognitive development are informative of children’s academic success. Moreover, many, but not all, task scores were significant predictors of grades, presenting a promising avenue for a more nuanced understanding of the most essential social skills for academic success. We will obtain fall 2018 grades from kindergarten teachers to examine how new teachers grade the children and how teachers’ grades in kindergarten relate to children’s social cognitive abilities in 4K. The comparison of 4K teachers’ predictions of children’s performance and kindergarten teachers’ grades will also reveal the extent to which teachers’ ratings of task performance are useful determinants of children’s future success.

Authors

• Katharine E Scott, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Ann King, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chuck Kalish, Society for Research in Child Development
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author