Hester de Boer’s research while affiliated with University of Groningen and other places

The rise of the soft skills movement should be seen in line with modernization, in the sense of keeping education responsive to the needs of a changing society, including changing demands of the labor market as well as cultural trends. In the case of “twenty first century skills” labor market demands were the most important impetus, while a more cultural trend was stimulated through the development of the “emotional intelligence” theory, with the development of social emotional learning programs (SELs) in its wake. Institutionally and geographically the roots of the movement are situated in the United States. The movement obtained an important boost from international organizations, with strong technical developmental input from the OECD. It is noted that students’ social and emotional functioning have always been an explicit concern in education, but the relatively new movement seeks to expand its scope and importance. What has changed is that the reservation with which the “non-cognitive” domains used to be treated, because of privacy concerns and fear of indoctrination, seems to have disappeared and is being replaced by very deliberate attempts to stimulate “social emotional learning” and promote “social emotional outcomes”. Next to the developmental history the chapter discusses various lines of criticism that the movement has evoked.

The chapter starts with referring to the multitude of desirable attributes as new objectives of education presented in programs for educational reform as ‘the 21st century-skills blob’. Social and emotional skills are just a subset of this unstructured multitude of attributes.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, research on the propagation of social and emotional skills in education has gradually come to include theories and models from developmental and personality psychology. As evident in contributions by the OECD.

Theoretically the issue of malleability of personality attributes by means of educational interventions leads to two questions: are the personality attributes specific enough to make modification feasible and are the educational interventions powerful enough to bring about the enduring change that we expect when we speak of learning? In this chapter we look at empirical evidence that directly speaks to the issue of malleability. We consider three types of studies: first, we look at studies from economists, secondly, we review meta-analyses based on evaluations of social emotional learning programs and thirdly we refer to studies in the tradition of educational effectiveness research.The studies by economists like Heckman and others have drawn a lot of attention but have been criticized on various grounds as well. The most relevant evidence comes from a series of meta-analyses, all of them showing effects of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs, of small to medium size. Notwithstanding the thoroughness of these meta-analyses the validity of the evidence is to be interrogated on several points. We found considerable ambiguity and vagueness in the definition of the interventions, often many facetted programs, as well as heterogeneity, lack of standardization and quality documentation of the SEL outcome measures. Non-experimental educational effectiveness studies show considerably lower effect sizes than reported in the meta-analyses on SEL effect-studies. In this research strand, school effects on social emotional outcomes are found to be considerably lower than on academic performance.

A first important notion is the realization that students’ social and emotional functioning has a long tradition in education. Good working attitudes and good behavior have always been important areas on which students were monitored. In didactic analysis, taxonomies of educational objectives were designed for the affective, next to the cognitive domain. What has changed is that the reservation with which the non-cognitive domains used to be treated, because of privacy concerns and fear of indoctrination, seems to have disappeared and is being replaced by very deliberate attempts to stimulate social-emotional learning and promote social emotional outcomes, even beyond the school context.

The main purpose of this chapter is to provide a more specific and concrete illustration on ‘what gets measured’ as part of the evolving trend of fostering social emotional skills in education. We have therefore opted for somewhat detailed descriptions of a limited set of instruments that are in the relevant literature, particularly as they are sometimes used as ‘effect measures’ in evaluations of social-emotional learning programs.

Altogether the review of the research evidence left many unanswered questions and prompted us to turn to the individual program evaluations, on which the meta-analyses were based, before making more definite assessments. This is the focus of Chap. 6. We selected evaluations studies of 8 programs that had drawn our attention for various reasons: prominence of the programs in review studies (e.g. PATHS, and Tools of the Mind), the presence of more or less explicit program theories (e.g. Comer’s school development program, and Positive Action) and we also tried to document variation in low, medium or relatively high program effects. For each program at least one program evaluation was discussed, while for some programs several evaluation studies were referred to. In order to provide the reader with an impression of the contents of these programs, considerable space was given to descriptions of the program interventions. Intervention modes were most frequently curriculum documents, like lesson programs and scripted teaching approaches, specific teacher training for the program, and sometimes adapted modes of school organization, staff cooperation and parent involvement. Lack of explicit program theories was a weakness in the majority of the evaluation studies that were reviewed. Questions about the appropriateness of the outcome measures, as discussed in the previous chapter, were also manifest in these case studies. Many interventions are only assessed with no, or short-term follow up and program evaluations are quite heterogeneous in the choice of outcome measures and, in targeting specific student populations, there is a bias towards disadvantaged groups.

In Chap. 3 we discussed the malleability of personality traits and trait facets by therapeutic interventions and showed that the effects of such interventions are not sufficiently impressive to warrant inclusion of personality development in school curricula. In this chapter, we will further test this conclusion by focusing on the effects of educational interventions on the trait conscientiousness and its underlying facets.

This book examines the global movement of putting more emphasis on students’ social and emotional development in education. It provides some order in the unstructured multitude of desirable socio-emotional educational objectives and ambitions that have resulted from this movement and builds on a careful conceptual analysis. It starts out by examining the roots of the movement and discusses different emphases. Next it makes use of instructional and psychological constructs and theories to arrive at meaningful categorizations of major domains and types of social-emotional “skills”. One of the key assumptions is that social and emotional attributes are malleable by means of educational interventions. The book reviews available research evidence for this assumption, taking into account psychological studies and meta-analyses. It then creates new evidence based on a new meta-analysis, which concentrated on the effects of educational interventions on skills associated with the conscientiousness factor of the Big5 taxonomy. In the final chapter, the book discusses the implications for educational policy and practice; a discussion in which attention is given to political and ethical questions about the desirability of treating social and emotional attributes as educational goals.

This meta-analytic review examines the relationships between students’ sense of school belonging and students’ motivational, social-emotional, behavioural, and academic functioning in secondary education. Moreover, it examines to what extent these relationships differ between different student groups (grade level, SES), measurement instruments, and region. The meta-analysis included 82 correlational studies, published in peer-reviewed journals between 2000 and 2018. Results revealed, on average, a small positive correlation with academic achievement, and small to moderate positive correlations with motivational outcomes such as mastery goal orientations; with social-emotional outcomes such as self-concept and self-efficacy; and with behavioural outcomes such as behavioural, cognitive, and agentic engagement. A small negative correlation is observed with absence and dropout rates. Similar results are found across different student groups (grade level, SES). Although the results vary to some extent across measurement instruments and region, generally, the results reveal that school belonging plays an important role in students’ school life.