Poster #93 - Individual Toddlers’ Interactions With Teachers, Peers, and the Classroom Environment in Danish and Dutch Childcare

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Toddlers’ interactions with teachers, peers and the classroom environment are critical for their academic and social development. Therefore, it is essential to capture the quality of these interactions from the perspective of individual children. For preschoolers, such an observational tool exists, the Individualized Classroom Assessment Scoring System Pre-Kindergarten (inCLASS Pre-K; Downer et al., 2010). The current study introduces a newly developed measure to capture toddlers’ individual experiences in the classroom, the inCLASS Toddler. Adaptations were made to capture toddlers’ non-verbal, pre-verbal and verbal interactions, as well as their engagement and behavior in the classroom in a developmentally appropriate way.

This paper presents the first validation results across two different cultural contexts: Denmark and the Netherlands. Childcare in these countries is comparable in structural and process quality as well as in their pedagogical orientation reflecting an emphasis on play and holistic development (Bleses et al., 2020; Slot, 2018). There are nuanced differences in the attention devoted to promoting school readiness among children, which appears to be stronger in the Netherlands. Given the similarities in observed classroom quality it is interesting to investigate the experiences of individual children in these two contexts.

Given prior evidence on the inCLASS Pre-K, we expected to find a four-factor structure for the inCLASS Toddler, older children to score higher on peer interactions and task engagement, and girls to score higher on peer interactions and lower on conflict interactions (i.a. Downer et al., 2010; Slot & Bleses, 2018; von Suchodoletz et al. 2015). Therefore this study examined the structural, construct and criterion validity of the inCLASS Toddler using observational data of Danish and Dutch toddlers (N = 211) across 58 classrooms.

First, results confirm the hypothesized four-factor structure of the inCLASS Toddler in Danish and Dutch children revealing higher quality of teacher interactions, compared to the quality of peer interactions. Also, toddlers showed overall mid to high levels of adaptive classroom behavior and engagement in play and activities, and slightly lower levels of self-reliance. Individual children’s interactions showed considerable classroom level variance supporting the notion that children’s social competencies are at least partly situated skills, which highlights the importance of using ecologically valid tools to measure these skills. Second, individual differences were found for children’s age, such that older children showed higher quality teacher and peer interactions and fewer conflicts, but there appeared no gender differences. Lastly, criterion validity of the inCLASS Toddler was evidenced by associations with children’s social-emotional, language, and math skills, for especially the quality of teacher interactions and to a lesser extent the quality of peer interactions.

These results support the applicability of the inCLASS Toddler for observing toddlers and their in-depth situated interaction competencies with not only the teachers, but also with peers and within tasks and activities. Moreover, the results highlight the importance of investigating individual children’s experiences in childcare as they can complement findings derived from overall classroom measures. Lastly, this tool can be useful for practitioners as well as researchers to evaluate toddlers’ competencies in an ecologically valid way.

Authors

• Pauline Slot, Universiteit Utrecht

• Marinka M. Willemsen, Aarhus University
  Presenting Author

• Dorthe Bleses, Aarhus

• Jason Downer, University of Virginia - Charlottesville