
Carmel CefaiUniversity of Malta · Centre For Resilience & Socio-emotional Health
Carmel Cefai
Phd (London)
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168
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (168)
The present study is part of the PROMEHS Project (https://www.promehs.org/). It investigated changes on teachers' social and emotional competences following the implementation of the Promehs program.
As the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) virus spread across the world, countries took drastic measures to counter the disease by requiring their citizens to home self-isolate i.e., lockdown. While it was not known how young people would cope with the social distancing restrictions, there was concern that the lockdown would have a debilitating effect on youth...
Paul Cooper dedicated his academic life researching and writing to advance theory and practice to nurture and enhance the wellbeing of marginalised and disadvantaged children, at a time when such children were not only voiceless and disenfranchised but frequently at the receiving end of punitive and exclusionary practices. In this book various coll...
Lymphoedema arises when the lymphatic system has been damaged and may occur secondary to cancer treatment. While much of the extant literature focuses on quality of life in females with breast cancer- related lymphoedema, this study explores the impact of living with lymphoedema secondary to cancer treatment in males. Semi-structured interviews wer...
Lymphoedema is a swelling in part of the body due to an obstructed flow of lymphatic fluid. Extant literature mainly targets coping strategies in females having breast cancer related lymphoedema. This research aims to explore the coping strategies of males living with lymphoedema, secondary to cancer treatment. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews...
As social and emotional education is becoming strengthened and ingrained in educational systems, the need to include children’s voices in its design and implementation is becoming more vocal. Children are agents who actively influence and shape their own lives. They are a source of knowledge and expertise, having unique and inside knowledge of what...
The aim of this project was to identify the wellbeing experiences and needs of children and young people living in Malta in order to develop policy actions to enhance their wellbeing. It explored the various dimensions of children’s subjective wellbeing and how they vary by age, gender, nationality/language, disability, and socioeconomic status. It...
The Covid-19 pandemic has provided a window of opportunity for education and schools to become more caring and compassionate, with wellbeing and social and emotional education becoming more established as a primary goal of post-covid education. Such a process, however, needs to start with the adults themselves, with initial teacher education becomi...
Introduction
Despite increasing interest in measuring social and emotional learning (SEL), there is a lack of European-validated tools for assessing the efficacy of SEL programs. The aim of this study was to validate an Italian version of the social skills improvement system (SSIS) SEL brief scales–student form.
Methods
Participants were 1,175 stu...
In the last two years, a growing number of studies have focused on the promotion of
students’ mental health to address the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, less studies have been conducted on sustaining teachers’ mental health which
has been affected by the sudden changes in online teaching and the difficulties in keeping
and bui...
Student engagement (SE) is known as one of the most relevant predictors of academic achievement and completion. Social and emotional competencies (SECs) are well established as critical skills for healthy and adaptative youth development. This systematic review investigated the associations between SE and SECs in students aged 10–25 years. The revi...
Editorials Training of teachers Art teachers Well-being Emotional intelligence
The pathway to higher education for students with a refugee or migrant background is not an easy one. Despite their potential, they face numerous challenges, in both accessing higher education and completing their studies successfully. They remain an ‘underrepresented equity group’ necessitating specific policies and actions to facilitate their acc...
Although children use social and emotional learning skills (SEL) across the world, the expression of these skills may vary across cultures and developmental levels. Such variability complicates the process of assessing SEL competencies with consequences for understanding differences in SEL skills and developing interventions. To address these chall...
A topical question for teachers and parents is how to improve students’ well-being and success at school, starting from the early stages of their education. Research shows that social-emotional competence is one of the key variables significantly impacting children’s learning outcomes and that social-emotional learning contributes to higher learnin...
The social-emotional skills of preschool children develop at a rapid pace. How this development occurs is closely related to the child’s environment. The social-emotional skills of the parents themselves play an important role in the development of a preschool child’s social-emotional skills and have a strong influence on the development of childre...
This research explores the use of trauma-sensitive practices in second chance education across four European countries, namely Austria, Ireland, Italy and Malta. The study used a quantitative methodology, whereby an online questionnaire was distributed amongst 249 educators who worked in second chance education. Over half of respondents believed th...
This research report presents the findings of semi- randomised evaluation of the Promoting Mental Health in School (PROMEHS) programme, developed by a nine-partners European consortium funded by the EU. The evaluation with more than 10,000 students from six different countries examined whether the progrmme is effective in enhancing students’ social...
As children and young people today face ever increasing social, emotional and mental health challenges, schools, as one of the primary systems in children’s lives, are called to broaden their agenda and help to address these challenges. This paper discusses the evaluation of a school-based, universal mental health promotion programme developed rece...
The SSIS SEL Brief Scales (SSIS SELb) are multi-informant (teacher, parent, and student) measures that were developed to efficiently assess the SEL competencies of school-age youth in the United States. Recently, the SSIS SELb was translated into multiple languages for use in a multi-site study across six European countries (Croatia, Greece, Italy,...
Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been on the rise in recent
decades in various countries and cultures across the globe. Its
rise is not only a reflection of the increasing social and emotional
challenges that children and young people are facing in the
twenty first century and the need for education to address such
issues, but also a result...
Student engagement research in university students has been scarce, despite its major positive role on performance, degree completion and mental health. Social and emotional competencies, which are currently called twenty-first-century skills, exert some impact on student engagement in youth. Since engagement is cultural-sensitive, individual (soci...
This research report presents the findings of a study investigating how Maltese towns and villages may become more child-friendly and consequently drive the key stakeholders to create appropriate spaces in collaboration with children and young people themselves. The study sought to explore the views of children, parents and community stakeholders o...
Children and adolescents face many challenges in today’s fast changing society and constantly have to overcome increasing levels of adversity in order to achieve success. Enhancing the ability of young people to cope with adversity by training in resilience skills has been the objective of several interventions and programs in the past years. Resil...
The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...
The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of social and emotional learning (SEL) skills and resilience in explaining mental health in male and female adolescents, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three self-report questionnaires were administered to 778 participants aged between 11 and 16 years (mean age = 12.73 years; SD = 1.73) and r...
This paper addresses the role of social emotional competence in the emotional and behavioral problems and learning outcomes of preschool children based on their parents’ and teachers’ evaluations. In this study, we compared the perceptions of teachers and parents when evaluating the same child using the multi-informant assessment. First, the associ...
This analytical report is in response to the recognised need for schools in Europe to prioritise and actively promote the mental health and well-being of school children within safe and inclusive contexts. It provides a framework on how well-being and mental
health in schools may be promoted through a systemic, whole-school approach, with illustrat...
Research has documented the role of emotions in learning and emotion regulation for student engagement (SE). However, knowledge regarding the predictive power of emotion regulation strategies (ERSs) on SE at different age-groups was lacking. Also, our study aimed to provide data on ERSs use based on age and gender since findings are mixed. This cro...
There appears to be an increased interest in various countries in Europe and other parts of the world, in the role of nurture groups in supporting the needs of young children experiencing social and emotional difficulties in their development. Nurture groups have been developed as special classes to address the unmet social and emotional needs of y...
Multisystemic Resilience brings together for the first time in one volume a wide range of resilience experts. By placing side-by-side the writing of psychologists, epigeneticists, ecologists, architects, disaster specialists, engineers, sociologists and public health researchers (to name just a few of the disciplines represented), this innovative v...
Like any other aspect of human development, resilience is best understood as the interaction between the individual and his or her environment, with both influencing one another. This chapter discusses the ecological, transactional approach to resilience, followed by a resilience framework for educational systems informed by the research evidence....
This research report presents the findings of a study on the wellbeing, mental health and resilience of Maltese school children during the first wave of the pandemic. An online survey examining subjective wellbeing, depression, anxiety, resilience, coping strategies and the positive and negative aspects of the pandemic, was completed by more than 4...
This analytical report seeks to address the evident gap in the formative assessment of social and emotional education by providing a framework indicating how social and emotional education may be assessed through a whole-school approach, both at individual (learner) and contextual (classroom climate and whole school system) levels, accompanied by i...
This report indicates that the major systems in Maltese
children’s lives, such as the family, the school, friends, and the community, appear to be functioning well for the majority of Maltese children. These systems are key indicators of children’s subjective wellbeing, as indicated by the high levels of cognitive, affective and psychological wellb...
Social and Emotional Learning in the Mediterranean: Cross Cultural Perspectives and Approaches is the first publication of this kind to explore how the Mediterranean region is seeking to address the issues and challenges in the promotion and implementation of SEL. It is an attempt to raise awareness on the SEL policies, frameworks and practices tak...
The first decades of the twenty first century are witnessing the transformation of Maltese society as it is increasingly becoming more socially, culturally and linguistically diverse. Recent years have been characterised by large migration flows, with both asylum seekers from North Africa, the Middle East and sub Saharan Africa, as well as thousand...
Resilience in Schools: Research and Practice includes 15 chapters by authors from different parts of the world on various aspects of resilience in educational contexts. It includes a prologue by Professor Micheal Ungar. The volume is divided in 3 sections, namely Issues and Perspectives, Programmes and Interventions, and Teacher Education. It is an...
Early School Leaving (ESL) is a complex phenomenon caused by multidimensional factors spanning personal, social and economic problems. We carried out two online surveys with 796 teachers and 900 students from Bulgaria, Italy, Malta, Romania and Turkey completed standard electronic surveys. The teachers’ survey consisted of secondary school teachers...
A Passage to Malta: The health and wellbeing of foreign children is the first national report on the health, wellbeing, education and inclusion of foreign children living in Malta. The research project consisted of four studies with about 2500 foreign and Maltese children, making use of both quantitative and qualitative research designs. The major...
While there is growing recognition of the need to distinguish between universal, selected, and indicated prevention levels in school bullying and violence research, this more nuanced focus is far from being systematically applied in key research studies in this area internationally. This article raises concerns about the need for such a differentia...
Editorial in which the acheivements of the journal over its first ten years are reviewed.
Background: In view of the globalised nature of today's world in which many cultural differences are fading away, we find it interesting to explore whether and to what extent there are differences in hope levels between two nationalities that are culturally relatively similar, yet differ in many respects. Although both the Czech Republic and Malta...
Teacher resilience is a key factor to understand how teachers effectively cope with the strains and stresses of their profession. In this chapter, we are presenting results from a survey study, in four different countries (Germany, Malta, Ireland and Portugal), on pre-service teacher resilience which was part of the project ENTREE (ENhancing Teache...
This chapter provides a project overview of the ENhancing Teacher REsilience in Europe (ENTREE) face-to-face training programme aimed to foster teachers’ relationships, wellbeing and commitment to education and schooling and, through this, their effectiveness in teaching. Six face-to-face training modules were developed, using the themes of resilie...
RESCUR Surfing the Waves is a recently developed resilience curriculum for early years and primary schools in Europe. It seeks to develop in marginalized young learners the requisite competences needed to overcome the various challenges in their lives to achieve academic success and social and emotional wellbeing. The competences include developing...
In our cross-cultural comparative study, we aimed to explore the level of subjective well-being and hierarchy of life values among Czech and Maltese university students. The links between life values and cognitive and affective components of subjective well-being were also investigated. The research sample (N = 280, aged 18 to 30 years, M = 21.9 ye...
Sommario In Europa il 20% dei bambini in età scolare sperimenta problematiche sociali, emotive e comportamentali all'interno dei contesti educativi. È quindi urgente proporre contesti capaci di promuovere il benessere, tramite i docenti. Il tema della resilienza e dello sviluppo delle competenze nei bambini assume un ruolo centrale come azione di i...
Children’s views on their use of leisure time and community space for play, socialising and physical exercise, and how satisfied they are with the quality of such time and space, constitute a critical aspect of the study of children’s wellbeing. This chapter presents the findings of two studies, one quantitative and one qualitative, on the views of...
The main aim of the chapter is to present the results of a research study exploring the correlates and predictors of perceived hope among Czech and Maltese populations. We examined the levels of perceived hope, optimism, life satisfaction, positive relations, loneliness, generativity, and spirituality, and investigated whether there are any signifi...
This NESET research report is focused on how social and emotional education may be strengthened in core curricula across the EU. It includes a review of the most recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies on the effectiveness of social and emotional education and proposes a multilevel framework on how it may be implemented in schools as...
This intervention involves pre‐ and posttest data collection using a purpose‐designed well‐being questionnaire. The Coping with Bullying and Wellbeing Intervention (CWBWI) is an evidence‐based Australian school program. It focuses on teaching young people to cope with bullying and to develop positive peer relations. The school‐based intervention—im...
In our cross-cultural comparative study, we compared the level of subjective well-being among South African, Czech and Maltese university students and explored the link between life values and cognitive and affective components of subjective well-being. The research sample (N = 390, aged 18 to 30 years, M = 21.58) consisted of 110 South African, 16...
INTRODUZIONE In Europa il 20% dei bambini in età scolare sperimenta problematiche sociali, emotive e comportamentali all'interno dei contesti educativi (Cefai et al., 2015). Diventa quindi fondamentale riuscire a creare contesti capaci di promuovere il benessere a scuola, anche grazie allo sviluppo di programmi di intervento universali e inclusivi...
The focus of assessment in higher education has been moving from assessment ‘of’ to assessment ‘for’ learning and teaching. This shift suggests that formative assessment with feedback can be more beneficial to learning and teaching than traditional summative assessment. In view of the tension that arises between the move towards formative assessmen...
The inclusion of the student perspective in helping to promote more effective learning, engagement and positive behaviour is becoming increasingly evident in both educational research and school and classroom practice. Giving students the opportunity to have a meaningful and influential voice enhances both the teaching and learning processes, impac...
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1: Introduction and Background Issues
1. Listening to Voices Across Spaces
Carmel Cefai and Paul Cooper
2. Evidence Based Approaches to Mental Health Issues in Schools:
Effective Strategies for the Classroom Practitioner
Paul Cooper
Part 2: Students’ Perspectives
3. Life at School and Mental Health from Students’ Points o...
Authors in this volume have drawn on a range of different evidence sources in their chapters, with the predominant emphasis being on narratives based on participant perspectives. This qualitative and interpretive emphasis is important for various reasons. First and foremost, it has enabled the authors to illuminate mental health promotion in school...
Universal interventions in mental health promotion in schools are increasingly gaining salience as schools seek to provide more relevant and meaningful education matched to the realities of the twenty first century. A universal perspective of mental health is focused on mental health promotion for all students through a whole school approach.
There has long been an understanding of the impact of the family situation on children’s school achievement across cultures and contexts and consequently also of the importance of involving parents in their children’s education. Ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1989) further highlighted the importance of the child’s interactions within th...
In recent decades, the World Health Organization has been actively engaged in the promotion of mental health in schools, particularly in view of the concern about mental health difficulties in children and young people. About 20% of school children across different cultures experience mental health problems during the course of any given year and m...
Children’s perspectives on their learning, behaviour, wellbeing and other aspects of their lives, are different from those of adults such as teachers and parents, and are a valuable source of information on how contexts such as schools, home and the community may improve the children’s wellbeing and quality of life (Cefai & Cooper, 2010; Hofve-Sabl...
It is of great concern to note statistics indicating that, in Australia for example, almost half of the population experience a mental disorder at some point in their lifetime (Slade et al., 2009) and 14% of children and adolescents have been identified as having mental health problems (Sawyer, Miller-Lewis, & Clark, 2007). This leads to an estimat...
A whole school approach to mental health promotion in schools takes a broad based systemic perspective, ranging from universal promotion of health and wellbeing to indicated and targeted interventions. This range encompasses staff education, curricula, classroom and school climates, and collaboration with parents, professionals and the community (A...
A brief survey of evidence based, classroom strategies for dealing with SEMH issues in classrooms.
School bullying is an EU-wide issue. It has serious and long-term effects, for both victims and perpetrators; and it takes many forms. This report raises awareness about the sizeable prevalence of school bullying in many EU countries and about its negative long-term impact. It highlights key lessons emerging from the most relevant European and inte...
Psychology and the Arts seeks to widen and develop the concepts employed by scholars and researchers coming from various fields in the areas of literature, art, film and psychoanalytic theories. This book provides new and creative explorations of various literary and artistic works from psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic perspectives. The book...
Nell’attuale momento storico attraversato da dinamiche di cambiamento dovute alla crisi economica, alla globalizzazione e alla presenza di una complessità di criticità, in cui il futuro delle persone viene continuamente ridefinito, diventa fondamentale predisporre contesti di crescita supportivi capaci di porre gli individui nella condizione di far...
A whole school approach to social and emotional learning and well-being, addresses social and emotional issues in the curriculum and in the organisation of teaching and learning, the development of a supportive school ethos and environment, and partnership with the wider school community (WHO, 2007). It integrates the development of individual soci...
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