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Table 2 Tests overview. All tests used pre- and post-intervention, and the targeted skills measures

From: A randomized controlled trial to examine the effect of two teaching methods on preschool children’s language and communication, executive functions, socioemotional comprehension, and early math skills

Test

Skills measured

Language:

 The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test [94]

receptive vocabulary

 The Bus Story Test [95, 96] – used at pretesting

lexical diversity (number of word types used); information score (how many events a child included in the narratives), syntactic complexity (number of subordinate clauses), morphological complexity (amount of well-formed utterances), and text length (total number of clauses)

 Frog, Where Are You? [97,98,99] – used at post-testing

lexical diversity (number of word types used); information score (how many events a child included in the narratives), syntactic complexity (number of subordinate clauses), morphological complexity (amount of well-formed utterances), and text length (total number of clauses)

 What’s Wrong Cards [100]a

productive vocabulary, observation skills and created in order to develop emotional literacy

Communicationb:

 An adapted version of ADOS [101]

meeting of gaze, adequate use of gestures, at ease body behavior, fluency/prosodic traits, following instructions, turn-taking behavior, and taking initiative/showing curiosity

Executive functions:

 The Dimensional Change Card Sort task (DCCS [59, 102])

cognitive flexibility/attention shifting (possibly working memory as well)

 The Flanker Fish Task [103,104,105]

inhibition

The Head-Shoulder-Knees-Toes (HSKT, [106])

inhibition, focused attention, and working memory

 Forward and Backward Digit Span [107]

short term memory, storage capacity, working memory

 Auditory selective attention was measured using event related potentials (ERPs) to attended and unattended probe sounds embedded in stories, i.e. the Swedish AUDAT paradigm

ability to attend to one story while ignoring another simultaneously presented story

Emotional Comprehension:

 Test of Emotion Comprehension [108, 109]

socioemotional comprehension, ability to recognize facial expressions (drawn faces) of emotions related to different stories read to the child by the test leader

Math:

 An adapted version of the Number Sense Screener [110,111,112]

one-to-one correspondence, number sense cardinality, ordinality and subitizing

  1. a. Note: What’s Wrong Cards were used as an additional method to assess verbal skills in the child. Each child watched three different cards depicting odd situations, such as someone trying to put a sweater on as trousers or ironing a hat, and were encouraged to describe the picture and elaborate on the peculiarities of the activities seen. However, as this did not yield enough data and we already had speech samples from the narrative task, we did not proceed to analyse the results
  2. b. Note: In the planning of the study [48], communication was regarded as a composite measure including the novel communication-rating of video-filmed interactions and the emotional comprehension test, TEC. However, as we did not know what to expect from the novel measure used, in the analysis phase we decided to keep the two measure separate and abandon the composite
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BMC Psychology

ISSN: 2050-7283

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