Social Skills in Kindergarten

This week’s article summary from the Washington Post is the one I referenced at the opening faculty/staff meeting: a twenty-year study on how social skills demonstrated in kindergarten predict future success in school and life.

I’ve highlighted one particular sentence (in the second to last paragraph) that gave me pause. The sentence states that kindergarten students with more developed social competencies continued in subsequent grades to get along well with classmates and teachers, which then led to success beyond school—in other words, a positive snowball effect.

I couldn’t help but think about the kindergarten students who for whatever reason didn’t demonstrate those those important kindergarten social competencies: What happened to them in subsequent school years?

I was fortunate as a student in that I did demonstrate those social competencies in kindergarten and in later grades. Based on the research study below, because social skills came easy to me, so did school. Yet I needed a lot of help and support in others areas of school: my lack of interest in reading and writing (not unusual with boys), ineptitude with anything related to art or music, reluctance/shyness asking questions in class. 

All of us were shaped by great teachers who built upon our strengths and innate gifts but who, more importantly, saw our weaknesses/deficiencies and who then pushed, urged, supported, nurtured, and challenged us.

As teachers we have the exciting but daunting responsibility to guide all our students—those with innate abilities and qualities and those who need support, guidance, and scaffolds.  

Regardless of where I went to school, I would have most likely become a friendly, nice, socially-adjusted adult, but the teachers who impacted me the most helped me become an avid reader and confident writer and an unabashed questioner—I still, however, fall short in music and art (no matter how great my teachers, my artistic inability and limited aptitude won out). 

Especially as we close our first week of school and continue to get to know our new students, let’s commit to supporting all of them, particularly those who will need your help, support, guidance, and care in order to succeed and thrive. 

To me, a better ending for the article below is that all the kindergarten kids in the study — even those with poor social skills in kindergarten — ultimately flourished in school and life because of the teachers they had!

Joe

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According to a new study, kindergartners who share, cooperate and are helpful are more likely to have a college degree and a job 20 years later than children who lack those social skills. Kids who get along well with others also are less likely to have substance-abuse problems and run-ins with the law.

The research, which involved tracking nearly 800 students for two decades, suggests that specific social-emotional skills among young children can be powerful predictors for success later in life.

These are skills that probably portend their ability to do well in school, to pay attention and to navigate their environment.

The study suggests that early-childhood education programs and schools should identify children with weak social skills early on, when they are still very receptive to learning how to behave differently.

The study is based on data collected beginning in 1991 at schools in Nashville, Seattle, rural Pennsylvania and Durham, N.C. Teachers of 753 kindergartners were asked to rate each student’s skill level in eight areas:

·      Resolves peer problems on his/her own.

·      Is very good at understanding other people’s feelings.

·      Shares materials with others.

·      Cooperates with peers without prompting.

·      Is helpful to others.

·      Listens to others’ point of view.

·      Can give suggestions and opinions without being bossy

·      Acts friendly toward others.

Researchers then tracked those students for two decades, using police records, reports from parents and self-reports from the children. They then used statistical models to filter out the effects of factors such as a child’s socio-­economic status, family characteristics and early academic ability to isolate the impact of early social skills on life outcomes.

Children who scored “well” on social competence were four times as likely to get a college degree by age 25 as those who scored “a little.”

Children who scored higher were also more likely to have a full-time job by the time they were 25. 

Similarly, children who scored on the lower end of the scale were more likely to have negative interactions with the police and spend time in juvenile detention. They also had a higher chance of being arrested, of recent binge drinking and of being on a waiting list for public housing.

The research does not say that the ability to share causes one’s life to go more smoothly or that refusing to share causes one’s life to be difficult. But coupled with the growing body of research on social-emotional skills, it provides more evidence for what seems like common sense: Children who interact well as kindergartners are more likely to make friends and get positive feedback from teachers and, therefore, are more likely to like school and stay in school.

The children in the study represented a cross-section of society, with a somewhat higher proportion of at-risk children than the general population. Of the sample, about half were white, 46 percent were black and 4 percent were from other ethnic backgrounds. Fifty-eight percent were boys.