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April 15, 2008
Issue Focus
Can Early Childhood Programs Support Social and Emotional Development?
Researchers have identified a large gap between the school achievement of low-income children and their more affluent peers that emerges early and tends to widen from kindergarten through first grade. Children’s social-emotional development may play a role in maintaining or increasing this gap. Children who have difficulty regulating their emotions and behaviors (i.e., those who are sad, withdrawn, or disruptive) have been found to receive less instruction, to be less engaged and less positive about their role as learners, and to have fewer opportunities for learning from peers. Also, children who have not learned to regulate their behavior may impede their peers’ chances for academic success by distracting teachers away from instructional activities and towards managing problem behavior in the classroom. And this challenge is not an isolated problem — studies suggest that 20-40 percent of children in low-income preschool classrooms may have difficulty regulating their behavior and emotions.
Head Start, the nation’s largest federally sponsored early childhood development program, serves nearly 1 million low-income children. Designed to “narrow the gap” between disadvantaged children and their more affluent peers, Head Start provides comprehensive programming during the preschool period to improve children’s social competence and academic readiness for school. Recent results from the national evaluation of Head Start show that access to this program results in small to moderate improvements in children’s academic skills but fewer effects on social-emotional outcomes, particularly for 4-year-olds. A nationally representative study of Head Start children shows that such children gain both academically and socially over the course of the Head Start year but continue to enter kindergarten behind higher-income children.
However, Head Start and other early childhood programs are operating with a surprisingly thin base of evidence about which classroom practices are most effective at supporting children’s social-emotional development — and even about whether focusing on social-emotional development will yield the kinds of improvements in children’s skills that policymakers and program operators seek.
Recent research has identified several fundamental skills that underlie emotional and social competence. And, building on theories of how children’s development unfolds, researchers and practitioners have developed a new generation of classroom-based strategies that are specifically designed to improve children’s skills in these areas. Such interventions are potentially important to children’s long-term development, as these two competencies are thought to lead to children’s positive social behaviors (interactions with teachers and children), as well as children’s learning engagement (their ability to sustain attention and stay on-task as required by the learning demands of school).
What do we mean by emotional competence? Emotional competence is defined generally as children’s ability to manage their emotions, to understand the feelings and emotions of themselves and others, and to take another’s perspective. Preschool-age children are considered emotionally competent if they can use their emotional resources and abilities to meet the specific demands and opportunities of the preschool environment — an environment that places particular emphasis on interacting with peers and adults and beginning to learn new academic skills.
Social competence is defined as children’s ability to enter into social relationships and manage their interactions with peers and form friendships, a critical task of preschool. To achieve this, children need to develop language and communication skills (to be able to speak to the relatively unskilled play partners that their peers are), to develop cooperative play skills (to take turns), and to control their aggressive impulses and be able to solve problems when there is a conflict.
Building on this research base, MDRC is working in partnership with government and private partners on two projects — Foundations of Learning and Head Start CARES — to learn more about interventions that focus on the social and emotional development of preschool children from low-income families. Head Start CARES was conceived and is sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Foundations of Learning is supported by a group of private foundations. Both projects are the product of a collaboration with prominent academics in the field of early childhood development.
The two projects will address: (1) whether programs targeting children’s social-emotional development are effective at improving children’s learning behaviors and social behavior, (2) what leads to effective implementation of these program models, and (3) whether such programs lead to long-term benefits for children’s academic skills by helping the high-risk children learn how to negotiate the school environment, while simultaneously improving the learning environment for all children in the classroom.
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