Social-Emotional Assessment of Child's School Readiness

描述(由申请人提供)：儿童早期评估的总体问题，及其与入学准备和其他决定的关系，目前正受到广泛辩论。扩大幼儿教育/幼儿保育入学人数，更好地了解幼儿发展的科学知识，决定公共支出，所有这些都要求从事幼儿工作的人员及其父母认真考虑使用哪些评估工具，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、基于发展的信息，在教师、家长和孩子的时间、努力和关注方面，最经济和最道德的信息。特别是，迫切需要更好的社会和情绪评估工具。长期以来，发展的社会和情感领域的重要性与它们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，人们似乎越来越广泛地认识到，在过去的几年里，人们对这些领域的关注在幼儿时期蓬勃发展，对同时和后来的幸福和心理健康以及学习和学业成功都至关重要。此外，Head Start项目将情感行为问题列为他们最需要的培训和技术援助之一。同样，教师认为孩子们的“学习准备”和“可教性”标志着积极的情绪表达、热情和调节情绪和行为的能力。基于这些断言，我们建议改进和测试一系列学龄前儿童社会情绪结果测量，这些测量挖掘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。整个五年计划包括试行当前版本的选定评估工具，大规模管理和修订每个工具，以及心理测量评估、初步正常化，以及检查这些措施的能力，以证明计划的效果和对理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.