Teaching the Teachers. Promoting Emotion Knowledge in Institutions of Early Childhood Education and Care.

• In Event: 2-203 - Teacher-led Interventions to Promote School Readiness

Integrative Statement

In the years of early childhood, children’s emotion knowledge develops rapidly and is strongly correlated with their language abilities (e.g., Pons et al., 2003) and with their self-regulative skills (e.g., Denham et al, 2012). All three variables are well known predictors of social and academic success in school (e.g., Voltmer & von Salisch, 2017). Promoting young children’s emotion knowledge is an important task for their teachers, because children spend many of their waking hours in institutions of early childhood education and care. Since learning about emotions is closely tied to language, an intervention was designed that aimed at improving educators’ language-teaching strategies and consequently, also children’s emotion knowledge and their scientific thinking. In this “Feeling Thinking Talking” (FTT) intervention, preschool and kindergarten teachers were trained for 40 hours, divided into four monthly sessions and two sessions devoted to rehearsal, elaboration, and translation into their specific institutions. In addition, we discussed the teachers’ behavior individually with them in two video feedback sessions.

In order to evaluate the FTT intervention, N= 244 three- to-five-year-old children in 13 German Kindergarten sites with 35 Kindergarten groups in two towns in Lower Saxony and in the city of Hamburg were allocated to the intervention or the control group. They were tested before the intervention with the teachers (t1), immediately after the intervention (t2), and three months later t2 (t3). To date, data for t1 and t2 are available.

The newly developed and Rasch-scaled Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge (ATEM) was used to evaluate children’s progress in six components of emotion knowledge, i.e., reading emotions in faces, recognizing external (situations, mixed emotions) and internal (desires, beliefs) reasons for emotions, and differentiating between expressed and experienced emotions. Item analyses of the ATEM already revealed good selectivity of the items and acceptable to excellent EAP/PV reliabilities of the components. The children were interviewed with a 40-item version of the ATEM and with measures capturing their receptive vocabulary (PPVT) and their behavioral self-regulation (HTKS).

A multilevel change model with children’s age, receptive vocabulary, and behavioral self-regulation as covariates on the first level was calculated. Kindergarten teachers formed the second level and ATEM scores were group-mean centered for the teachers. Receptive vocabulary (ß= 0.095, p< .001) and behavioral self-regulation (ß= 0.157, p= .012) were significant predictors of the ATEM scores at t1, confirming the role of language- and regulative skills in developing emotion knowledge. Having a large receptive vocabulary was related to a stronger increase in the ATEM scores from t1 to t2 (ß= 0.068, p= .002). There was a significant difference in the initial ATEM scores between the control and the intervention group in Hildesheim versus Hamburg (5.792, p = .003). Furthermore, there was a significant difference in the effects of the FTT intervention between Hildesheim and Hamburg (5.645, p = .049), indicating differential treatment effects with regard to the town in which the intervention was carried out. Results will be discussed in terms of implementation fidelity.

Authors

• Maria von Salisch, Leuphana University Lueneburg
  Presenting Author

• Katharina Voltmer, Leuphana University Lueneburg
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tobias Koch, Leuphana University Lueneburg
  Non-Presenting Author