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As the pressure to succeed academically is imposed on children earlier than ever before, it is essential to understand what characteristics are most important to parents and teachers in order to be school ready. While formally readiness is typically measured using chronological age and mastery of cognitive skills, it also involves physical, behavioral and social-emotional development. Variability exists culturally as to the importance of these various early school readiness characteristics. Moreover, while parents and teachers generally agree, discrepancies between parents and teachers on the importance of specific components for early school readiness arise. In the current study, we examined which characteristics of early school readiness were deemed most and least important according to parents and teachers of 30-42 months old children. Our findings indicate that teachers and parents agreed upon the relative importance of early school readiness components. For both groups, being healthy, happy, and socially skilled were generally ranked as more important than cognitive abilities in the preschool aged child. These conclusions are promising because children's success is facilitated when parents and teachers share beliefs on which skills children need to successfully transition into the classroom environment.

Research Findings: Emotion knowledge is one facet of social and emotional learning (SEL) that emerges in early childhood. Various interventions and measures target preschoolers' emotional skills to bolster these foundational competencies prior to formal schooling. One measure of emotion knowledge specifically with preschool children is the Affect Knowledge Test (AKT). Despite decades of use and adaptations for different modalities and populations of preschoolers, no study has previously examined the psychometric properties of independent items on the AKT. This study utilized Rasch procedures to analyze how items on the AKT function across a sample of 193 preschoolers (mean age = 49.7 months). Analyses revealed that a unidimensional Rasch model fit well to the item data. Age was a significant predictor of affect knowledge, with older children having increased affect knowledge scores. Results support previous findings of a ceiling effect for older children. Practice and Policy: Our study adds to the empirical understanding of the AKT and its use as a tool to measure emotion knowledge in young children. The children's scores on the AKT had adequate reliability, supporting the use of AKT for low stakes research-based purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]