Lehrpersonen- und Elternurteile über sozial-emotionale Kompetenzen von Kindern mit Verhaltensauffälligkeiten

Judgments about the social-emotional competence of children with behavioral problems differ between parents and teachers. The reasons for the differences in judgments have been rarely studied. Several studies show that judgments weakly correlate with scores on standardized developmental tests. Additionally, children’s social-emotional competence correlates with teacher-student relationship and parents’ empathy. The question is examined how consistently parents and teachers judge social-emotional competence and how the teacher-student relationship and the parents’ empathy explain these judgment differences. Cross-sectional questionnaire data with parents’ and teachers’ judgments on N = 158 children with behavioral problems from kindergarten and elementary school were analyzed. All teachers’ judgments correlated with the results of the developmental test, while only some of the parents’ judgments correlated with them. Moderated regression analyses show higher parental ratings on social-emotional competence of children with behavioral problems than teachers’ ratings. With a better teacher-student relationship, the judgments of parents and teachers converge. With higher empathy of parents, the differences in judgments become larger. The results show that the assessment of social-emotional competence should be addressed in teacher education and continuing education.