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

Social competence in a preschool setting, defined as children's success in interacting with peers and teachers, and showing adaptive classroom and task-related behavior, has shown to be predictive of subsequent positive social-emotional, academic, and school outcomes. Social competence is partly viewed as an individual skill, but is also shaped by the environmental and cultural context, resulting from the classroom experiences, activities, and interactions that are provided to children. Evaluating children's social competence as expressed in day-to-day contexts requires an appropriate tool that takes into account the interactional nature of this behavior. The inCLASS Pre-K is such an observational tool, developed in the United States (U.S.) that assesses individual children's classroom interactions with peers, teachers and tasks. The aims of the current study are threefold: i) to investigate the applicability of the inCLASS Pre-K in Danish preschools constituting a different cultural context, ii) to assess children's broad social competence by looking at their interactions with peers, teachers and tasks, iii) to study the extent to which the inCLASS Pre-K is capturing individual differences in children, depending on their age, gender and language background. A total of 184 children of 81 classrooms were observed on two occasions. The results supported the applicability of the inCLASS Pre-K in Denmark by confirming the four-factor structure reported in previous studies, and in line with previous work revealing small to moderate stability both within one day and across two observation days, and good inter-rater reliability. Danish children showed a higher quality of interactions with peers and lower quality interactions with the teacher as compared to results from the U.S. and Germany. The findings revealed only few individual differences between children in which boys had more conflict interactions than girls. In addition, older children scored lower on peer interactions and task orientation and higher on conflict interactions compared to younger children, although these associations decreased or disappeared when controlling for the mean age of children in the classroom. Interestingly, individual children's interactions with the teacher, peers, and materials showed moderate classroom level variance, which might in part explain the lack of stronger individual differences. Altogether, this supports the notion that children's social competence in the classroom is at least in part a situated skill that is shaped by the environment and cultural context. Contrary to the U.S., which seems to more strongly reflect a dyadic model of teacher-child interactions in teacher-directed (learning) activities, the findings from Denmark illustrate a model of preschool education with a stronger emphasis on free play and social peer interactions. Overall, the findings from this study support the applicability of the inCLASS Pre-K in Denmark and enhance our understanding on what classroom quality looks like from an individual child's perspective and, as such, is informative in improving educational practices.