Poster #215 - Accessible Measurement of Young Children’s Social-Emotional Development

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

National attention has begun to shift around early intervention to increasingly younger ages. Despite this, there are few cost-effective, actionable tools available for educators to assess toddler abilities in a developmentally appropriate manner (Marulis & Neuman, 2010). In order to have the greatest impact, it’s essential to have both a strong tool and a tool that’s accessible to educators, regardless of their resources. The current study explores approaches to measuring social-emotional development (SED) as one part of a larger developmental assessment tool targeted toward children 12-36 months of age.

This developmental assessment tool includes five early development domains: SED, Cognitive Development, Early Communication, Early Math, and Physical Development. The tool is targeted for children ranging from 24-35 months but can also be administered to younger or older children as needed. Items present a wide range of difficulty, spanning from approximately 9 to 36+ months. The current paper focuses on the Social-Emotional domain, originally conceived as an observation domain, but reconsidered as a rating scale (See Table 1 for a structural review of this domain).

During the first iteration of this tool, the Social-Emotional domain was completed observationally. Data were collected through five separate ten- to fifteen-minute observations for each child, resulting in approximately one hour of data collection per child. Assessors were instructed to observe multiple children at one time when possible. After noting the time constraints of conducting observations for the SED domain, the authors piloted the same observational items in a rating scale format. Assessors were trained on the SED observational items and asked to remain aware of these throughout their time with children. Assessors were provided with a rating scale for each student and indicated which behaviors were most common for children. These were completed after the end of a larger, 3-week assessment window so that assessors had familiarity with the children. Within the same window, other assessors completed observations as usual. Data are on a 4-point scale, with 0 as “emerging” and 3 as Level 3 (expected performance for a 36-month old).

Paired samples t-tests were conducted to compare observational and rating scale data for all SED sub-constructs. A bonferroni correction was used for multiple comparisons. The data were comparable between observations and rating scales, with the exceptions of expression of emotion (EE) and initiative/task orientation (ITO) (see Table 2). Examination of these variables shows a minimal difference between means (0.15 and 0.30, respectively), but a few child outliers with particularly high or low scores as drivers of these differences.

As the final goal of this larger project is to create an easy-to-use resource for teachers, the authors opted to move forward with the rating scale instead of collecting observational data in future data collection waves.

Authors

• Leah Dowling, AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation
  Presenting Author

• Abby Carlson, AppleTree Institute
  Non-Presenting Author