Construction of a Scale for Investigating Pre-School Children’s Social Situations of Development: Focusing on Activities instead of Abilities

Introduction

In this article we will discuss the principles for evaluating preschool children’s social situation of development in day-care. The discussion take departure in a project that constructed screening tools for 3- and 5-year-old children in Greenland. The background for the project was that in 2008 the Danish welfare Institute investigated 0—14-year-old children and their families’ well­being in Greenland [3]. This investigation resulted in a depressing report about everyday life conditions for children in Greenland. These results led to initiatives by the Greenland Home-rule Government to create institutional practices for preschool children. In 2012 also a law about screening 3- and 5-year-old children was passed, and a task force group were established led by Naussunguaq Lyberth to realise the law. Mariane Hedegaard became a consultant for this group. Drawing on Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory and the day-care tradition in Greenland, the task force group constructed an instrument to evaluate 3- and 5-year-old children’s social situation of development focusing on the activities children particpat- ed in, rather than children’s functions and abilities.

The result of the task force’s work became the screening tools UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 [13; 14]1 that reflected the competences and activities that the educational system in Greenland evaluated as important. A child’s social situation of development covers both the child’s activities and the conditions that pedagogues and careers give to enable the child to take him or herself forward as a learner. The assessment was directed at six areas, the first (1) was connected to the child’s health and wellbeing. Focus of health were (1.1) vision, (1.2) hearing, (1.3) physical health (1.4) height and weight and (1.5) wellbeing. The following five were connected to how the child relates to other people participating in shared activities: these were (2) Social interaction and competences. Focus area: how the child relates to other people and creates contacts. (3) Communication and language competences. Focus area: how the child relates to other people through communication and language. (4) Sensation and movement. Focus area: how the child relates to other persons by moving around and paying attention. (5) Cooperation and initiation of activities. Focus area: how the child contributes to shared frameworks and child-led activities. (6) Knowledge of nature and culture. Focus areas: how the child relates to nature and cultural activities in Greenland. Through such an evaluation it is possible to point to areas of concern in a child’s social situation of development.

In the following we will present the cultural tradition for testing in Denmark and Greenland and a critique that led to using the cultural historical theoretical tradition initiated by Vygotsky as the foundation for constructing the screening material The aim has been to construct tools that assess children’s situation of development through the activities they participate in. It is then possible both to point to areas of concern in a child’s developmental situation and also to get ideas to overcome these concerns.

In the last section we will illustrate how one can use the results of investigating children’s social situation of development to meet found concerns. This also has implications for identifying the kinds of support needed for preparing children’s transition from home or nursery to preschool and from kindergarten to school.

Finding a way to accept screening of children
as an important activity

In the 1960ties and 1970ties exploring children’s development was in Denmark oriented to cognitive test, (Binet, WISC, Cattel’s infant intelligence scale) and clinical test (Rorschach and CAT). When daycare institutions in the Scandinavian countries became more common, other types of material more oriented to pedagogical analyses of children’s difficulties and school readiness came on the market to help both teachers and psychologists evaluate children’ way of functioning. Several were based on Piaget’s theory, favouring a one-dimensional scale for evaluation. Marx Wartofsky [17] questioned Piaget’s stage description arguing that Piaget used an essentialist ontology of childhood where the child is conceptualized as a genetically fixed and determinate entity. In opposition he argues:

What is needed instead is a radically cultural conception of childhood, one that acknowledges the historicity of the conception, and therefore also the extent to which the category essentially transcends the biogenetic characterization; and that also acknowledges the extent to which the biogenetic characterizations themselves mirror different cultural and historical norms. [17: 192]

In line with this argument Hedegaard [6] had formulated the interaction based observation method as an alternative evaluation material for young children that also was advocated as a research method for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) [10]. This method is based on the conception that to evaluate children’s development one has to evaluate the child in his/her everyday settings. This can be done by participating in the child’s everyday life situations observing and interacting with the child, recording the activities and then interpret the recordings to find out what the child is intentional oriented to and the demands that is put on the child.

This method though requires too many resources when the development of all children 3- and 5-year-olds have to be evaluated every year in Greenland. Instead it was used as a method to evaluate a sample of children when testing the screening material (UBUS 3 and UBUS 5). The difference between the interaction based observation method and the screening material, the task force constructed, is that the screening material cannot evaluate children's intentions in actual activity (get the child’s perspective), instead the screening material (UBUS 3 and UBUS 5), evaluate children’s interaction with other children and adults in daily activities, thereby focusing on children’s social situation of development from the educational (societal) perspective.

Before deciding to construct their own material the task force reviewed 13 of the latest materials for evaluating preschool children’s development to find a tool that could evaluate children’ s development from a cultural an educational perspective in Greenland.[2] Some of these were already in use in Greenland (TRAS, a Norwegian scale; RABU, a Danish scale; Borne-linealen, a Danish — Greenlandic scale; Kuno Beller’s Developmental Description, a Danish-German evaluation system). The task force group came to the conclusion that these materials focus too much on children’s functions independent of the environmental and cultural conditions, therefore these materials gave little possibility to evaluate children’s social situation of development, in a way that informed relevant educational initiatives in their social situations. The screening results we argued should be tools for finding areas of concern and give direction for how to support and motivate children to participate in activities with other children within the areas of concern. Therefore the task force decided to construct screening materials (UBUS 3 and UBUS 5) that were relevant for 3- and 5-year-old children in Greenland focusing on the activities that one expects 3- and5-year-old children in Greenland should be able to enter into. The challenge then became to construct a material that are relevant for all 3-and 5-years in Greenland that also could meet the UN criteria for children’s development, to support that children could grow up to become world citizens.

The task force accepted the ideas that the screening of children 3- and 5-years in Greenland should not serve the neutral content free evaluation of children but should become relevant for children in their actual concrete society and be a tool that supports children in difficult situations. Therefore, the task force decided to use the cultural-historical approach from Vygotsky as foundation for constructing the screening material.

The theoretical foundation for constructing
a screening material to evaluate children's
social situation of development

The cultural-historical approach forwards the view that a child should not only be seen as an entity in itself, but that the contextual conditions and the child are a unit. Vygotsky [16] express it this way:

One of the major impediments of theoretical and practical study of child development is the incorrect solutions of the problem of environment and it role in the dynamic of age when the environment is consid - ered as something outside with respect to the child, as circumstance of development, as aggregate of objective conditions existing without reference to the child and affecting him by the fact of their existence. The understanding of environment that developed in biology as applied to evolution of animal species must not be transferred to the teaching on child development. [16: 198]

Leontiev [12], described the relation between humans and the social conditions in which they are situated as united as a dynamic relationship with each other, where children finds the motive and goals for activity.

Humans do not simply find external conditions to which they must adapt their activity. Rather these social conditions bear with them the motives and goals of their activity, it means and modes. [12: 47—48].

In line with this Hedegaard point out, when evaluating a child’s development, one has to be aware of the demands the child meets and how these demands interact with the child’s motive orientation [8]. From this perspective Hedegaard argued in the task force for evaluating children in their everyday activities.

To understand children age periods as cultural constructed we used Vygotsky’s [16] concept of the child’s social situation of development.

We must admit that at the beginning of each age period, there develops a completely original, exclusive, single and unique relation, specific to a given age, between the child and reality, mainly social reality, that surrounds him. We call this relation the social situation of development at the given age. [16: 198]

The term ‘a given age period’ depicts what is expected from a child in different periods in life. These periods are connected to the different institutions and their different practices in which the child comes to participate in over the life-time. In a given society a child’s nominal age often fits with the age period, because the way family and care person in the different practices (daycare, school, high school) interact with most children falls inside the range of the social situations at the given age period [1; 4; 7].

The theoretical conceptions from the cultural-historical approach to children’s development are that children’s age period reflects societies expectation and that the demands and motives are interconnected. These conceptions became the foundation for the task force’s construction of the screening tool. Evaluation of children from this perspective has to be seen as an educational evaluation for supporting children to develop their activities within the age period of 3 respective 5-year-olds that reflected the demands and expectation to this age group.

Across the Nordic countries there are some shared views that also are reflected in the institutions in Greenland, on what should be expected of a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old child. At 3-years, children are expected to be ready to go to day-care, which means that the children are able to control their own movements, imitating other people and starting to play with other children. At 5-years, they are expected to take initiatives in shared activities and play and start to orient themselves to school activities, which they start as 6-year-olds.

Expectations of 3- and 5-year-old children are built into institutional practice in daycare and the routines children meet here. Consequently, we cannot evaluate a child’s competences in isolation. There can be cultural differences in the same nation as there is in Greenland but daycare and school practice have to aim at giving children possibilities for development so they can enter into the institutions that give equal opportunities for education independent of where they live in Greenland. To construct an as assessment tool like UBUS 3 and UBUS 5, it is important that it captures central Greenlandic values in characterizing children’s development in the two age periods. Therefore, the task force had to represent different institutions related to child-care in Greenland. The group had several meetings to find a way to construct instruments that evaluate children’s social situation of development in the two different age periods where the focus should be on the child’s activities, instead of focusing on their functions and abilities in isolation from environment. Such an approach to assessment also gives insights into possibilities for interventions in a child's developmental situation pointing to the kind of support needed for preparing children’s transition from home or nursery to preschool and from kindergarten to school.

Constructing the screening material

The content of the first versions of UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 related to the learning goals formulated for
preschool education in Denmark3 and modified by the task force group to fit to what were seen as important in Greenland. This content was formulated as questions about a child’s participation in the mentioned activity that the evaluators could judge as ‘can’, ‘can partial’ (to some degree), ‘cannot’. This version was tested in selected kindergarten and day-care institutions in each of the different counties in Greenland4. Experience from this testing was used to reformulate several of the questions

One of Vygotsky’s [15] most important theoretical points is that children with disabilities also have developmental processes where the community and social situation are crucial for their development into di^^^e^^i^^ age periods. After the first versions of UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 were constructed we realised that we missed a category about children’s health because a child’s health may influence the child’s participation in activities with other clhi- dren. Therefore, health and wellbeing became the first point of evaluation, in the final versions with health containing, vision, hearing, physical health and height and weight. The development of children with physical impairment orhea^h problems in early childhood must be supported to recover. Children with more permanent disabilities have to be supported so that they can develop their social competencies needed to participate in activities that are valued in society to get a dignified life. Children with physical disabilities in early childhood Bottcher [2] point out, need both support and opportunities to play and have fun as other children.

We revised the versions three times. Parallel with the testing, the staff from the Government’s Center for ECEC visited the different day-care institutions to follow the kinds of problems that the early-care-workers had with using the screening tools, and the ECEC staff also made interaction-based observations of selected children to test and validate the screening results against the direct observations. The difference in the questions used to evaluate 3- and 5-year-old children will be illustrated with two question areas (Tab. 1) and (Tab. 2).

The zone of concern: How to use the results
from UBUS 3 and UBUS 5

Since staff can answer: ‘can’, ‘partial’ or ‘cannot’, in their assessment of children’s activities, it is possible to draw a profile for a child that shows the way the early- care-worker evaluates the child’s competences to participate in activities (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).

Table 1

Showing the difference in area 2) social competence and interaction between 3- and 5-year-old children in how they make contacts and establish friendships

Table 2

Showing the difference in area 4) participation in sensation and movement activities between 3- and 5-year-old children in how they relate to other persons in moving around and paying attention

The evaluation of the first area: children’s health and wellbeing, needs to be positive (the first area in the final version), otherwise the early-care-worker, who evaluate the child must take immediate action to get medical help. The parents also need to be involved, so that shared care can be started. If the score for one of the other five areas is negative or if there are more than two partial scores the early-care-worker should suggest interventions to
be realised immediately and a new screening should be done after three months. If the same concerns remains the day-care institution should contact the social service center. If there are more than 2 cannot the social service center should be contacted immediately. The following two cases illustrate differences in scorings that lead to different forms of intervention.

Evaluation of a 3-year-oldgirl —

Stella’s[3] developmental situation

The first case is a 3-year-old girl from the first testing round of UBUS 3, where health questions are not in the material. The profile from the early-care-worker’s answer to the screening questions (Fig. 1) shows that the early- care-worker had concerns about the child’s movement and sensation (area 3) cooperation in activities (area 4) and cultural activities (area 5). The instruction to UBUS 3 says that the kindergarten staff has consider a child if possible, in their educational plan for all children, while ensuring that the specific child in concern is particularly supported. After three months they have to evaluate the progress of the child in concern by making a new screening, to see if their interventions have supported the child.

As shown in the profile Stella only partially master body activities, for example, taking clothes on and off, drawing, making puzzle, jumping, singing and dancing (3). She does not cooperate well in play (4) and she only partially participate in singing, musicking and dansing (5).

Educational advice from Center for ECEC:

The early-care-workers should pay attention to Stella when she takes clothes on and off to support her in doing this. They should initiate play in small groups so the girl together with other children may come to play different adult roles (i.e., father, mother, child, doctor, shop keeper). The adults also may initiate doctor plays where Stella may explore her body and initiate play where she together with other children may jump, roll, dance (i.e., play dogs, monkeys and other animals). The early-care- workers should initiate song play to support Stella’s imitation and play as well as cultural knowledge. After three months the girl should be screened again.

Evaluation of a 5-year-old boy —

Anda’s developmental situation

The second case to illustrate how concerns may be met is from the third testing round of UBUS 5, where health together with wellbeing are now in the first area to be questioned. The early-care-worker’s answers to the screenings questions about Anda, a 5 year old boy, result in the profile shown in Fig. 2. The profile shows that the Anda’s social situation of development is very concerning.

The ealy-care-worker that filled out UBUS 5 wrote the following comment:

He has difficulty accepting directions, for example, that he must not go outside the playground’s fence despite explanations. He will not always wash hands before eating time. Nor does he want to participate when we are singing in the group or doing shared activities. After half a year in the kindergarten, the boy still cannot name the children and the adults. The boy never tells anything about what they do at home or in holidays. The adults find it hard to understand the boy when he talks.

The profile shows that Anda seems healthy and in general happy (1). His way of communicating with the other children and adults are not the best, and he does not play with words or talk about his experiences (2). He knows that one has to accept rules in play and games, but he do not negotiate about these in play and he cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy in hearing stories and in play. (3) He does not accept decision and will not be guided by decisions in a play group. (5). He does not know the seasons of the year and cannot tell about animal or plants. He does not participate in cultural activities such as imitating singing or dancing (6).

 Fig. 1. UBUS 3, profile of a 3-year-old girl
The vertical axe illusrate the answer can (1), partial (2) and cannot (3). The horisontal axis depicts the six areas: 11.1—1.3 social interaction and competences, 2.1—2.3: communication and language competences, 3.1—3.3: sensation and movement, 4.1—4.3: cooperation in activities, 5.1—5.2: knowledge of nature and culture, 6.1: well being6.

Educational advices from CECE:

While consulting the social service center in accordance with the municipality’s rules, the advice is that special pedagogical precautions must be taken immediately focusing especially on Anda’s communicative and linguistic development. In cooperation with the parents, a plan of action should be drawn up on how to teach Anda to participate in joint activities. The early-care-workers have to support the boy to participate in small groups where he can learn to accept shared rules. The early-care-workers have to take Anda out into nature together with other children and support the boy’s learning about nature. They also have to engage him in shared cultural events in the community together with other children.

Follow up

As a result of the initiative of contacting the school psychology center Anda got a pedagogical helper. Also, the Head of the Center for ECEC visited the boy’s kindergarten as part of testing UBUS 5. She used the interaction-based observations to validate the screening. She made two observations in the morning- and lunch sessions. We will present an extract of the second observation here.

Observation december 9th

Observer: Naussunguaq Lyberth,

Head teacher K, pedagogical helper M

(second day at work)

K contacts Anda and invites him to be with them. She talks to the kids about what color things are. Anda has found a watch and chooses to give the watch to M and sits down with her. K is now doing letter recognition with the kids. Anda knows A and says Anka (Uncle). Anda then walks out of the room but comes back a little later and bring a long stick, which he uses as a cane and walks like an “old” man. Sometimes he looks at what the other boys are doing and sometimes he says the same letter sound as the others say. He contacts K by first touching her bottom and then her body. He takes a book and sits on the floor where M goes over to him. They read the picture book together and M asks Anda to tell what they see. They talk about what’s in the book and laugh. As they finish reading, Anda contacts two boys playing picture lottery. He says “do you play”, and asks “can we play together?”.

A conflict arises between Anda and two boys, where it is clear that Anda would like to join their picture lottery game. He takes one of their pieces and starts playing in the boys’ games, without taking into account, what the two boys are doing. They try to take the piece back. They tell K and she intervenes. Anda gives the piece back. He then walks out of the room. He comes back with a lego airplane and flies with it and shouts very loudly with a ‘soprano voice’, he probably doesn’t know how loud it sounds and smiles happily. M asks him to go out and wash his hands as they will soon be having lunch. She takes him to the bathroom. Out there, he starts screaming loudly and scolding M. M quietly answers him. K and M enter the room without Anda, and he continues with loud noises outside, but is ignored, after a while he says something to K from the outside and she answers that they are having lunch now. Anda answers again from the outside. K goes out to him and comes back alone. Anda comes in and plays with the airplane and shows it to K. K says if he doesn’t eat, he will get hungry and the kitchen lady also tells him he will get tired if he doesn’t eat. Anda tries to catch the other boys’ attention, he lands his airplane on a boy’s head. K says, he has to stop. Anda goes away and comes back a little later. He continues to disturb the other children, and the adults quietly try to make him quit. Then he grabs a key in a string and swings it around (it looks dangerous). The kitchen lady is worried and says aloud, that now he has grabbed a key. K goes to him to get the key and M wants to help K. Anda throws the key and runs away. K sits down at the boys' lunch table and tries to get Anda to sit down. Since he still does not want to eat, she starts preparing some food he can eat later and tells him that he can eat it when he gets hungry. Anda looks at her but says nothing. Then he starts playing with K’s hair, then he jumps up on the table and K takes him down quietly, then runs out of the room and M follows him where he throws something, and M says he shouldn’t

The observations show that: Anda can accept demands and seems content to have contact with the staff in the kindergarten, also the new helper M. He orients for a while to the teacher’s activity about hearing which words start with different letters. He plays role play (i.e., he’s an old man with a cane). He also looks for a while with M in a book where they take turns saying what they see. He knows that the airplane he has in his hand is not his, although he initially says it is. He touches others and plays with the K’s hair

The observations indicate: that Anda wants to have contact with the other children, but he has an inappropriate way of making contact. He can follow the teacher’s instructions, but when he does not, conflicts take over. It is quite clear that he must have help to contact and communicate with the other children so that they accept that he joins their activities. It is also important that teachers help him avoid conflicts, and stay with him until conflicts are resolved, as the bathroom example illustrates. He tries here to stay in contact with the adults, even though he is outside the room where they have lunch. Anda is demanding in these conflict situations but he need support to find a way forward.

Discussion

The aim in this article has been to discuss how it may be possible to formulate screening material to evaluate preschool children’s social situation of development. This discussion has been illustrated with the Greenlan- dic screening material UBUS 3 and UBUS 5. With this material the idea has been to construct an educational tool to support children in areas of concern in their social situation of development, so they may become included in shared activities in their daycare practice. In this article the aim has been to discuss principles for how such a material may be constructed[7].

UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 are screening materials developed in Greenland relating to Greenland’s daycare laws about daycare practices that contain the values for children’s social situation of development in early childhood. It means that the material cannot be directly transferred to other nations’ daycare but has to be interpreted in relation to other nations values for early childhood development and daycare traditions. It may though be relevant to get inspiration from UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 to construct screening material for other nations’ kindergartens, since UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 are based on ideas from the cultural-historical psychology for children’s development. By using a cultural-historical understanding of children’s development the child and its environment are seen as a unit. A child’s social situation is created in interaction with its caretakers and the conditions society gives for their interaction.

To illustrate how the specific conditions in a society may influence the type of questions that are possible to ask, we will take the area of nature and culture. Because the see, the mountains, snow and ice are the central part of the Greenlandic nature, therefore it will be relevant to evaluate children’s knowledge about these areas and children’s way to participate in activities in nature dominated by these characteristics. Also, it will be relevant to evaluate children’s knowledge about the cultural tradition related to the nature in Greenland, where transport goes by water, where children may participate in collecting berries and follow parents in hunting either rein­deers or seals. It would have been impossible to made fair evaluation that relate to local values of nature if it only has been based on the consultant’s knowledge from Denmark about nature in forest, meadows and fields. On the other side she contributed with her theoretical knowledge, that may be characterized as radical transcending the local. The instruments UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 can be seen as radical-local [9] because it builds on a wholeness theory of child development that focuses on children's learning and motive orietation as cultural, anchored in local conditions and traditions that become the foundations for general concepts.

The evaluation shown in a child’s screening profile creates a useful visual image that the daycare staff can share with the child’s primary carers. It can therefore be used as a point of departure for creating common knowledge between home and daycare, coordinating what matters both for parents and for daycare staff, allowing differences in practice at home and in daycare. If the different care persons in home and daycare acknowledge the importance of each way of relating to the child and the activities in each place supports the child’s social situation of development (Edwards, 2010, 2017). It can also be used so that the different practitioners within the supporting systems of ECEC, medical specialists and the school psychologist with their different strengths and orientation to what matters can act together when supporting a child’s within areas of concern. To support transitions from home to daycare and from daycare to school we see UBUS 3 and UBUS 5 as a tools that can be used to create common knowledge for parents, daycare staff and teachers to offer support that respects the traditions of both home and the different educational setting of daycare and school. It is important that those involved in supporting the child are able to support each other. Our argument throughout this chapter has been that those adults who are central in the child’s learning and development need to pay attention to helping the child create social situations of development that allow them to overcome the difficulties to be found in areas of concern.