Social-Emotional Assessment of Child's School Readiness

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童早期评估的整体问题，以及它与入学准备和其他决定的关系，目前被广泛讨论。扩大幼儿教育/幼儿保育的入学人数，提高有关幼儿发展的科学知识，以及作出有关公共支出的决定，都迫使从事幼儿工作的人员及其父母认真考虑使用哪种评估工具，以及为什么和何时使用这些工具。我们需要利用评估来产生最需要的、以发展为基础的信息，在教师、家长和孩子的时间、努力和注意力方面最经济、最合乎道德。特别是，迫切需要更好的社会和情感评估工具。长期以来，社会和情感发展领域的重要性与其在教育规划和评估中的地位之间的脱节一直令人遗憾（Denham, Lydick, Mitchell-Copeland, & Sawyer, 1996）。然而，随着人们越来越多地认识到这一点，在过去几年里，人们开始关注幼儿时期的这些领域，因为它们对幼儿时期和以后的幸福和心理健康，以及学习和学业成功都至关重要。此外，学前教育项目将情绪行为问题列为他们最需要的培训和技术援助。同样，教师认为儿童的“学习准备”和“可教性”以积极的情感表达、热情和调节情绪和行为的能力为标志。基于这些结论，我们建议完善和测试一系列学前社会情绪结果测量，这些测量利用了情绪和社会能力理论的几个核心结构，特别是情绪表达、情绪调节、情绪知识、社会问题解决以及积极和消极的社会行为。整个五年计划包括对选定的评估工具的现有版本进行试点，对每种评估工具进行大规模管理和修订，以及心理测量学评估、初步规范和检查这些措施的能力，以证明项目的效果和对了解个别儿童的有用性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall issue of assessment during early childhood, and its relation to school readiness and other decisions, is currently widely debated. Expanding early childhood education/child care enrollments, better scientific knowledge about early childhood development, and decisions about public spending, all oblige persons working with young children, and their parents, to carefully consider which assessment tools to use, as well as why and when to use them. We need to utilize assessments that yield the most-needed, developmentally grounded information, most economically and most ethically in terms of teacher, parent, and child time, effort, and attention. In particular, better social and emotional assessment tools are sorely needed. The disconnection between the importance of the social and emotional domains of development and their status within educational programming and assessment has long been lamented (Denham, Lydick, Mitchell-Copeland, & Sawyer, 1996). In what appears to be ever-broadening recognition, however, the last several years have witnessed a blossoming of attention to these areas during early childhood, as crucial for both concurrent and later well-being and mental health, as well as learning and academic success. Further, Head Start programs cite emotional-behavior issues among their top needs for training and technical assistance. Similarly, teachers view children's "readiness to learn" and "teachability" as marked by positive emotional expressiveness, enthusiasm, and ability to regulate emotions and behaviors . Based on these assertions, we propose to refine and test a battery of preschool social-emotional outcome measures, which tap several constructs central to emotional and social competence theory, specifically emotional expression, emotion regulation, emotion knowledge, social problem solving, and positive and negative social behavior. The overall five-year plan includes piloting of current versions of selected assessment tools, large scale administration and revision of each, as well as psychometric evaluation, initial norming, and examination of the measures' abilities to demonstrate program effects and usefulness in understanding individual children.