EMOTERS OVERVIEW

What is the EMOTERS?

 

Surprisingly little is known about specific strategies teachers use to support children’s social and emotional development. Students’ social and emotional learning (SEL) is certainly valued, especially in early childhood. Indeed, with its focus on the whole child and origins apart from formal school systems, the field of early childhood has long recognized that children’s social-emotional skills feature prominently in their ability to establish healthy relationships and attain desired goals in preschool environments. Yet, scant research has documented how and why what teachers do in the classroom does or doesn’t support children’s social and emotional learning (SEL). We sought funding from the U.S. Department of Education to support the iterative measurement development and validation of an observational assessment of preschool teacher practices that support children's emerging emotional competence. We call this instrument the EMOtion TEaching Rating Scale or the EMOTERS.

 

In developing the EMOTERS, we intentionally partnered with a variety of preschool settings (community-based, Head Start, and private) and recruited a sample of teachers from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. However, we acknowledge that we sampled relatively few programs and we encourage more work to expand our understanding of the instrument’s functioning in additional contexts, both in and outside the U.S.

 

Intended Use

 

The EMOTERS was designed to be used both as a reflection tool for professional development and as an assessment tool for research. Ratings can be made following either live or video-based observations of preschool classrooms (rooms serving children ages three- to five-years old). The instrument was iteratively developed to support reliable scoring across  numerous coders from different backgrounds and valid inferences into teachers practices and children’s classroom experiences. At the same time, as with all observational rating tools, raters are expected to vary to some degree in their scores and validity evidence is continually accumulating. We encourage users to follow sound measurement practice and examine reliability and validity in their local context. We also emphasize that the EMOTERS was not designed to be used for high-stakes accountability monitoring or decision making.

​

Want to Learn More?

 

Gain access to the full EMOTERS Instrument Description document by filling out the EMOTERS Tool Interest Form below.