About this session

Friday, 1:20 PM - 2:50 PM

How Racial, Ethnic, and Linguistic Diversity Shapes Social-Emotional Development in Preschool

The acquisition of foundational social-emotional skills in early childhood is crucial to ensuring school success across both social and cognitive domains. Social-emotional development is especially pronounced in preschool, where children spend time practicing these skills independently with their peers in novel environments and situations. Still, few studies have examined the development of these skills in diverse preschoolers, instead focusing primarily on white and middle class populations. Given the increasing diversity of preschoolers in the US, we must understand social-emotional development in racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse children, and how student diversity informs this development.

Our symposium examines social-emotional development among diverse preschoolers, and asks how student and peer diversity is associated with this development. Paper 1 examines how children’s ability to express supportive emotion regulation strategies for peers in distress varies by child racial-ethnic identity and how responses may differ for in-group versus out-group peers. Paper 2 examines how individual and classroom-level language composition and diversity moderate growth in children’s emotion knowledge skills over the preschool year. Paper 3 examines the integrated learning experiences that promote children’s social and self-regulatory competence and the inequitable access that racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse children have to such experiences. Paper 4 uses latent profile analyses to examine prosocial, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors in Spanish-English dual-language learners (DLLs) longitudinally as they transition from preschool to Kindergarten. Together, these papers offer new perspectives on social-emotional development in early childhood within and among racially/ethnically and linguistically diverse populations to promote equity and anti-racism.

Paper #1
Title	The Role of Gender and Race in Children’s Empathy Skills Across a Preschool Year
Presenting author	Emma Sofia Strouse, Stanford Graduate School of Education, United States

Paper #2
Title	Measuring Heterogeneity in Socioemotional Skills Among Spanish-English DLLs from Preschool Through the End of Kindergarten
Presenting author	Lisa Maria López, Ph.D., University of South Florida, United States

Paper #3
Title	Peer Effects on Preschoolers’ Expressive Emotion Knowledge Gains: The Moderating Role of Classroom Language Diversity
Presenting author	Gladys María Aguilar, PhD, Stanford Graduate School of Education, United States

Paper #4
Title	Promoting Social and Self-Regulatory Competence Among Diverse Children With a High-Quality Preschool Curriculum
Presenting author	Dr. Jeanne L. Reid, Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Catie Connolly, Stanford Graduate School of Education, United States; Javier Omar, , United States

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