Social-emotional skills: Where do we stand in the region and what can we do to promote their development?
School closures and the suspension of face-to-face classes forced by the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the well-being and social-emotional development of children and young people, as shown by a recent UNICEF study conducted in 2020 in nine countries. While the importance of developing social-emotional skills for people’s present and future achievements has been widely recognized, the outbreak of the pandemic has further exposed the need to expand and improve the approach to social-emotional learning from various perspectives, particularly from the education system.
Why are social-emotional skills important? These skills refer to dimensions of personality and the ability to regulate people’s emotions (such as perseverance, self-control, self-confidence, resilience, among others) and have been found (ver RED2016) to be positively correlated with educational performance, with labor outcomes (in particular, greater workplace participation and likelihood of having a job) and with other dimensions of life and insertion into society, such as citizen participation and life satisfaction levels. Also, cognitive and socio-emotional skills are often interconnected and the levels of both skill types at any given time affect the development of those skills in the future. Lastly, several studies have documented that many of the skills valued by employers refer to social-emotional skills.
Where does Latin America stand in terms of developing social-emotional skills? A CAF study, which obtains a comparable measure of these skills in 15-year-olds from several countries based on answers in international PISA tests, found that, as has been observed in relation to cognitive skills, students in Latin America are also lagging in the development of socio-emotional skills related mainly to motivation, ability to concentrate and perseverance. Among the young and adult population, there are great inequalities in the development of these skills by socioeconomic level, as evidenced in the 2016 EDR.
How to promote the development of social-emotional skills in children and young people? The first crucial step is to be able to measure these skills, in order to understand the current state among children and young people, and design policies to promote their development. Measurement is not simple, because these skills are generally measured indirectly, using self-evaluation reports, observer reports or through administrative records on aspects of student behavior, such as absences or warnings for bad behavior. There are different types of measurement that have been used in Latin America and OECD countries, each with advantages and disadvantages, as documented in a report by CAF and others.
It is important, on the one hand, to have scale measurements, which, together with the diagnosis of academic performance, provide decision makers with demographic information that helps them identify where to target policies and programs to develop these skills. But it is also desirable to implement formative evaluations, administered at schools in order provide teachers and staff with a tool and the information on their students in a timely manner, to help them start designing relevant actions. A recent example is an application developed during the pandemic aimed at supporting educational staff in the diagnosis of cognitive and socio-emotional skills and guide pedagogical support decisions called Comprehensive Learning Diagnosis, developed by Chile’s Education Quality Agency. Another interesting example is the tool developed by MESACTS, which includes a scale of positive and negative emotions and delves into the causes for concern.
Another important aspect to consider is the social-emotional training of teachers. Since teachers are the main implementers of programs to strengthen socio-emotional skills of children and young people, their personal well-being and their own development of social-emotional skills are important to achieve these goals in students. However, recent reports have found that socio-emotional training appears to be scarce in initial teacher training programs in Latin America, and there also seem to be few active training programs aimed at developing these skills in educators.
Lastly, we must considered that, despite the importance of the educational system on the development of these skills, it is not the only area where we can encourage their development, which poses inter-sectoral articulation challenges. Another way to assist in the lifelong development of socio-emotional skills is through psychosocial support actions in family and community life. Lastly, the approach to social-emotional learning should also be extended to vocational training programs that address gaps in employment, especially in young people who have not completed secondary education; to gradually incorporate these competences into national certification systems or national qualifications frameworks, as a mechanism for articulating education and training and lifelong learning. There are some examples in this area, but stronger impetus is desirable.
