ABSTRACTEXAMINING RELATIONSHIPS AMONG PRE-SERVICE PROFESSIONALS’ COURSEWORK, KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS, AND PRACTICES RELATED TO CHILDREN’S SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENTByTamesha N. HarewoodChildren’s early social-emotional development is important to their lifelong learning, academic success, and school readiness. With greater focus on high-quality early care experiences and increasing numbers of children enrolled in early education and care settings, the role of early childhood teachers has become more important to children’s development. However, many children enter kindergarten lacking social-emotional skills and many early childhood teachers report being unprepared to support children’s social-emotional development. Institutions of higher education provide opportunities for teachers to improve their knowledge and skills, and meet standards in the early childhood education field, which expect teachers to have knowledge of children’s development and strategies to support children’s learning and development across domains. Yet, research has only examined basic links between education and classroom quality, limiting our understanding of what educational experiences contribute to teachers’ development of knowledge and skills to work with young children. One current impediment to this line of research is the lack of existing tools to assess teacher knowledge. In the current research a tool was created to assess pre-service teachers’ knowledge of social-emotional development and its psychometric properties tested in Study 1, this tool was then used to answer more substantive questions related to teachers’ coursework, knowledge, beliefs, and practices in Study 2. These were cross-sectional studies using a convenience sample of undergraduate students at a Midwestern university in the United States. Participants included 160 students enrolled in courses through a Human Development and Family Studies department. In Study 1, the Knowledge of Social-Emotional Milestones and Support Strategies (K-SEMS) tool was determined as having two indices (the Knowledge of Social-Emotional Milestones index and the Knowledge of Social-Emotional Support Strategies Index), which were valid and moderately reliable. Study 2 found pre-service teachers who took more domain-specific coursework had more accurate knowledge of preschoolers’ social-emotional milestones and strategies, as well as higher endorsements of beliefs about expressing and support emotions in the classroom. Observing a subsample of the larger 160 participants, Study 2 also found pre-service teachers (n = 33) with more accurate knowledge and higher endorsements of instruction/modeling beliefs about emotions more frequently used developmentally supportive social-emotional practices in the classroom. These findings have implications for research, policy, and practice related to the education and development of early childhood teachers.
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