Child Care and Early Education Research Connections

Skip to main content

Teacher reports of social-emotional development: Moving from measure to construct

Description:

This study evaluates how teacher report measures align with different conceptualizations of children’s social-emotional development. Leveraging seven teacher report measures of social competence and behavioral regulation in a predominantly low-income, population-based rural sample of four-year-old children (n = 828), model fit and validity were evaluated in a series of confirmatory factor models, including bifactor models. A bifactor model with behavioral regulation as a general factor and an orthogonal social competence factor emerged as the preferred model. Results indicate that teacher reports of behavioral regulation capture teachers’ perceptions of preschoolers’ behavioral regulation. However, teacher reports of social competence reflect teachers’ perceptions of both social competence and behavioral regulation. Post-hoc analyses were conducted to explore potential explanations for these findings. Implications for interpreting teacher reports of social-emotional development and for future work strengthening the quality of scalable measures of children’s social-emotional development are discussed. (author abstract)

Resource Type:
Reports & Papers
Country:
United States

Related resources include summaries, versions, measures (instruments), or other resources in which the current document plays a part. Research products funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation are related to their project records.

- You May Also Like

These resources share similarities with the current selection.

Social-emotional development measurement guide

Other

Measuring preschool teachers' social-emotional practices: A comparison of two measures

Reports & Papers

Early childhood education and school readiness: Conceptual models, constructs, and measures: Workshop summary

Other
Release: 'v1.61.0' | Built: 2024-04-23 23:03:38 EDT