DEVELOPING POSITIVE SOCIAL and emotional growth and development in young children has always been a fundamental priority of early childhood practitioners. However, with an increasing economic and political focus on the foundational early childhood years, there has been a global push for the measurement of outcomes in early childhood education. This paper reports the findings of a major literature review to examine the assessment of social and emotional competence and wellbeing in young children. The review was conducted by a team at Edith Cowan University as part of a project funded by the Western Australian Department of Education and Training. It describes a number of issues about assessment dominating the early childhood literature. The paper then reports on the complexities of examining a domain that is socially and culturally constructed and where meaning belongs to the individual rather than to the person assessing the individual's behaviours.
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