Why preschool teachers show kids emojis

“I wanted to develop tests for social skills and vocabulary aimed at preschool children,” says Hermundur Sigmundsson. He is a professor at NTNU's Department of Psychology.

The reason is that social skills and vocabulary are so important, especially for children and adolescents. 

The researcher explains that early screening is very important for early intervention if the child needs extra help.

Tested the method on 127 kids

The vocabulary test for children aged 18 to 24 months is still under development in Iceland. But the social skills test is well on its way to completion. 

Sigmundsson presented this test in a scientific article.

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

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

Using emoji faces for the children’s test

The test is designed to be easy to use. They use an emoji-based so-called 'Likert scale' from 1 to 5.

Here, 1 is a very sad face, while 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.

Appears to be reliable

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, the researcher believes that 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.

Reference: 

Sigmundsson, H. Social Skills Scale: Aspects of reliability and validity of a new 9-item scale assessing social-skills, Frontiers in Education, 2026. DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1769238

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Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no