Strengthening School Connectedness to Increase Student Success
Category: Student Well-Being
Instrument Overview
Denham’s Affective Knowledge Test (AKT; 1986) utilizes puppets to measure preschoolers’ developmentally appropriate understanding of emotional expressions and situations. Children's understanding of emotion is assessed using puppets with detachable faces that depict happy, sad, angry, and afraid expressions. First, children are asked to both verbally name the emotions depicted on these faces, and then to nonverbally identify them by pointing. This procedure taps into their ability to recognize expressions of emotion. Then, in two subtests of emotion situation knowledge, the puppeteer makes standard facial and vocal expressions of emotions while enacting emotion‐laden stories, such as fear during a nightmare, happiness at getting some ice cream, and anger at having a block tower destroyed. Children place on the puppet the face that depicts the puppet's feeling in each situation. In eight situations, the puppet feels emotions that would be common to most people, such as those mentioned above. Finally, children are asked to make inferences of emotions in nonsterotypical, equivocal situations. This subtest measures how well children identify others' feelings in situations where the "other" feels differently than the child. All the situations that the puppeteer depicts during this section of the measure could easily elicit one of two different emotions in different people, as in feeling happy or afraid to get into a swimming pool. Before the assessment, children’s parents report, via forced‐choice questionnaire, how their children would feel; these responses determine the emotions expressed by the puppet. For example, if the parent reports that the child would be happy to come to preschool, the puppet is depicted feeling sad.
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Organization
Topic
Student Well-Being Category
American Institutes for Research® partnered with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to collect instruments related to student well-being.
Content
Grades
Kindergarten,
1st Grade,
2nd Grade,
3rd Grade,
4th Grade,
5th Grade
Keywords
Social Awareness
Respondent
Student
Access and Use
Setting
Classroom
