Computerization of an emotion knowledge assessment for preschoolers: Supporting their school readiness

Watanabe, N (Naomi)¹, Kobayashi, T (Tessei)^1
1NTT Communication Science Laboratories

 

Submission type

Poster only

Scheduled

Hallway, 22-07-2016, 16:00 - 17:00

Keywords

computerization, emotion understanding, preschool, school readiness, Japan

Summary

In recent years, to promote preschoolers’ social-emotional development as an essential part of school readiness, researchers call for the need to computerize social-emotional assessments, which allow teachers and other educational practitioners to assess children’s social-emotional skills and track their development (Denham et al., 2012). In this study, we computerized the Affect Knowledge Test (Japanese version; Watanabe et al., 2014), in which the child is asked to name and identify four basic emotions (i.e., happy, sad, angry, afraid) and to identify the protagonist’s emotion for each emotion-eliciting situation. And then we administered the computer-based version and the original in-person version to 76 preschoolers in a laboratory. Overall, the participants seemed to be enjoying both versions. However, because Japanese preschoolers in general are shy and not get used to express emotions explicitly, it was challenging to encourage the participants to name the emotions on the computer-based version. Modifications that we made to make the computer-based version easy to use and several considerations with regards to field-testing of the computer-based version (i.e., administer the version at preschool) will be discussed.    

Auteurs