Social-Emotional Assessment of Child's School Readiness

描述（由申请人提供）：幼儿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引起了广泛争论。扩大幼儿教育/儿童保育入学率，提高对幼儿发展的科学认识，以及决定公共开支，所有这些都迫使从事幼儿工作的人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，以产生最需要的，基于发展的信息，最经济和最道德的教师，家长和孩子的时间，努力和注意力。特别是，迫切需要更好的社会和情感评估工具。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长期以来一直令人遗憾（Denham，Lydick，Mitchell-Copeland，&索耶，1996）。然而，在似乎不断扩大的认识中，过去几年见证了对幼儿期这些领域的关注，这些领域对同期和以后的福祉和心理健康以及学习和学术成功至关重要。此外，Head Start计划将情感行为问题列为其培训和技术援助的首要需求。同样，教师认为孩子的“学习意愿”和“可教性”是以积极的情感表达、热情和调节情绪和行为的能力为标志的。基于这些主张，我们建议完善和测试一组学前社会情绪结果的措施，其中挖掘几个核心结构的情绪和社会能力理论，特别是情绪表达，情绪调节，情绪知识，社会问题解决，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行版本进行试点，大规模管理和修订每一种工具，以及进行心理测量评估、初步规范化，并检查这些措施在了解个别儿童方面展示方案效果和有用性的能力。

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.