Socio-Emotional Strengths in Early Childhood Education

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In partnership with the , Toronto’s third largest provider of Early Childhood Education (ECE) services, we aimed to investigate the development of socio-emotional strengths for infants, toddlers, and children enrolled in LEF’s ECE programs. Socioemotional strengths were assessed using the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment for Infants (DECA-I; Mackrain et al., 2007), Toddlers (DECA-T; Mackrain et al., 2007), and Preschoolers (DECA-P; LeBuffe & Naglieri, 2012), and the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA; LeBuffe et al., 2014). The subscales for these measures are included in the table below:

Subscales

Analyses:

We employed multilevel modelling to explore:

  • Trajectories of socioemotional strengths during ECE programming
  • The proportion of variance in socioemotional strengths explained by time, individual, classroom, and centre differences 
  • Individual, classroom, and neighbourhood level predictors of baseline levels and trajectories of socioemotional strengths

Publications

Zhang, J., Sloss, I., Maguire, N., & Browne, D. T. (2024). Physical activity and social-emotional learning in Canadian children: Multilevel perspectives within an early childhood education and care setting. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy, 4, 100069.

Browne, D. T., Wade, M., May, S., Maguire, N., Wise, D., Estey, K., & Frampton, P. (2021). Children’s mental health problems during the initial emergence of COVID-19. Canadian Psychology, 62(1), 65-72.

References

LeBuffe, P.A. & Naglieri, J.A. (2012). Devereux early childhood assessment for preschoolers, second edition. Kaplan Early Learning Company.

LeBuffe, P.A., Shapiro, V.B., & Naglieri, J.A. (2014). Devereux Student Strengths Assessment: K-8th grade: A measure of social-emotional competencies of children in kindergartern through eight grade. Aperture Education. 

Mackrain, M., LeBuffe, P., & Powell, G. (2007). Devereux early childhood assessment for infants and toddlers. Kaplan Early Learning Company.