"I wanted to develop tests for social skills and vocabulary aimed at preschool children," says Professor Hermundur Sigmundsson at the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

The reason is that social skills and vocabulary are so important, especially for children and adolescents. Early screening is very important for early intervention if the child needs extra help.

The vocabulary test for18- to 24-month-old children is still under development in Iceland, but the social skills test is well on its way to completion. Sigmundsson has a new article in Fronters in Education where he presents this test.

"Our new test measures social skills in children aged 3-5. The preschool teacher uses 9 questions to evaluate the child's social skills.

The researchers tested this on 127 children in Iceland aged 3 to 5 years. The average was 3.8 years. Kindergarten teachers filled in the assessments.

The test is designed to be easy to use. The researchers used an emoji-based so-called "Likert scale" from 1 to 5, where 1 is a very sad face, 3 is a neutral face and 5 is a very happy face. The goal was to see if the test works, if it is stable and if it gives reliable results. The results are encouraging.

"We see that the test is well suited for children in this age group. All the questions relate to the overall result, and the correlations were good," says Sigmundsson.

To check whether different teachers arrive at approximately the same results, 10 children were assessed by two different early childhood educators. The comparison showed good agreement between the results from the two educators who assessed the children. The scale gives a score of 0.89 on the Cronbach scale, which indicates that it is reliable.

All in all, this looks promising, and it suggests that the test can be further developed.

"The next step is to try it on more children, and to check that it works just as well in larger and more representative groups," says Sigmundsson.