Individual children’s interactions with teachers, peers, and tasks: The applicability of the inCLASS Pre-K in Danish preschools

Pre-school social skills, defined as children successfully interacting with their peers and teachers, and adaptive classrooms and task-related behaviour, have been shown to predict positive social, emotional, academic and school results later on in life. The purpose of the investigation is: i) to investigate the applicability of inCLASS Pre-K in Danish pre-schools consisting of different cultural contexts, ii) to assess children’s broad social skills by looking at their interactions with peers, teachers and tasks, iii) to study the extent to which inCLASS Pre-K identifies individual differences among children, depending on age, gender and linguistic background.

The findings revealed only a few individual differences between the children’s behaviour, where the boys were hardly involved in more conflicts than the girls. In addition, older children performed worse than younger children regarding socialisation among their peers and the orientation of tasks, and they had more conflicts compared to younger children. These differences decreased or disappeared when the median age in the classroom was taken into consideration.

This observational study used data from an RCT study that involved 184 children. 25 pre-schools from three municipalities were asked to participate in the study. A more in-depth investigation was carried out on the learning environment, and the employees at the pre-schools were asked to rank the children’s involvement, behavioural difficulties and follow-up requirements. Both cross-sectional analysis and longitudinal analysis were used. 

Slot, P. L. & Bleses, D. (2018). “Individual children’s interactions with teachers, peers, and tasks: The applicability of the inCLASS Pre-K in Danish preschools”. Learning and Individual Differences, 61:68–76.