Abstract
This issue of Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment addresses the role of social and emotional competencies at every stage of education, from the developing competencies of preschoolers right through to the emotional intelligence of classroom teachers. Emotions and emotion-related skills are important in education for two reasons: (a) as facilitators of traditionally valued outcomes such as academic skills, higher test scores, and better grades; and (b) as a valued outcome in and of themselves. While academic skills are certainly important, it is a worthy goal to have happy students with strong emotional skills, and who are resilient to negative emotions, irrespective of their grades. Contributors to this issue highlight the important role of emotions and emotional competencies for both sets of outcomes, considering the role of constructs like emotion regulation, emotional reactions to school, and other aspects of emotional intelligence. Table 1 contains a brief overview of studies that were selected for this special issue.
Summary of Studies Included in this Special Issue of Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment
Research on emotional contagion further highlights the importance of emotions in the classroom, suggesting that one individual’s emotional experiences may impact the surrounding students, class, and even school (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993). For example, a teacher’s emotional tone may translate to a happy or unhappy class, who are more or less well-behaved, and may be more or less likely to seek help or guidance. Nizielski, Hallum, Lopes, and Schutz’s (2012) contribution to this issue shows that teachers’ emotional intelligence predicts students’ classroom conduct. Similarly, one student’s anger-management or anxiety issues can affect a whole project group, a whole classroom, and even a whole school. Conversely, one students’ enthusiasm for school can spread to their peers. In fact, Lipnevich, MacCann, Bertling, Naemi, & Roberts’ (2012) contribution to this issue suggests that positive emotions are more important than negative emotions in predicting students’ grades and well-being.
Collectively, the contributions to this issue demonstrate that emotions and emotional competencies have an important impact on education throughout a student’s educational path, relating to both students’ academic development and their social and emotional development. The issue covers the full trajectory of education, from preschoolers (Garner & Waajid, 2012), elementary and middle school students (Rivers et al., 2012), high school students (Burger & Nadirova, 2012; Lipnevich et al., 2012), university students from a variety of disciplines and different countries (James, Bore, & Zito, 2012; Keefer, Parker, & Wood, 2012; Li, Saklofske, Bowden, Yan, & Fung, 2012; Troth, Jordan, & Lawrence, 2012) and even teachers themselves (Nizielski et al., 2012).
Garner and Waajid (2012) show that even in preschool, emotion knowledge and self- regulation are significant predictors of children’s social competence, cognitive competence, and classroom-behavior-problems. That is, the early development of school-readiness may rely on young children’s emotional capabilities just as much as their cognitive capacities. Further along, along the educational trajectory, Rivers et al., (2012) demonstrate that scores on the youth version of the MSCEIT (an ability-based assessment of emotional intelligence) relate to healthier psychological functioning and greater social competence among elementary and middle school students. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that abilities such as emotion perception, emotional understanding, and emotion management may be reliably measured by psychometric tests in young teens. As well, Li et al. (2012) provide support for the robustness of the emotional intelligence construct and its measurement across cultures and languages. Our contributors also show that emotions are important for high school students, with emotion-related constructs predicting a variety of valued outcomes, including life satisfaction and students’ school grades (Burger & Nadirova, 2012; Lipnevich et al., 2012). Three other contributors also demonstrate that emotional intelligence is important for success at university, predicting six-year dropout rates, student well-being, and social cohesion among student teams (James et al., 2012; Keefer et al., 2012; Troth et al., 2012). Finally, Nizielski et al. (2012) demonstrate that emotional intelligence is not just important for students, but for their teachers: Emotionally intelligent teachers pay more attention to their students’ needs which in turn leads to lower levels of student misconduct.
In addition to multiple stages of education, the current special issue represents research from multiple countries around the world, and is truly international in scope. Participant samples in these studies are drawn from the United States (Garner & Waajid, 2012; Lipnevich et al., 2012; Rivers et al., 2012), China (Li et al., 2012), Syria (Nizielski et al., 2012), Australia (James et al., 2012; Troth et al., 2012), and Canada (Burger & Nadirova, 2012; Keefer et al., 2012; Li et al., 2012). As such, findings represent an international context for studying the effect of emotional skills in educational settings.
This special issue of Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment demonstrates that emotional skills may be universally important at every stage of education. Learning is a much more complicated process than just the transmission of knowledge from textbooks or teachers to students’ minds. Students need to negotiate teamwork and group assignments with their peers, develop good working relationships with their teachers, and be able to share resources ranging from coloring books in kindergarten right through to out-of-print books at university. Thus, if educational programs intend to adequately prepare young people for the challenges and demands of the current time, the sole focus on improving cognitive abilities (e.g., expanding their knowledge base) will not suffice. Instead, attention should be paid to effective assessment and subsequent development of students’ social and emotional skills. The current contributors attest to this claim and show that a range of emotion-related skills are critical for students’ academic and personal success. We hope and trust that this collection of articles will encourage researchers, teachers, and policy makers to focus on the critical role of emotions in student academic achievement and life functioning.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.