Purpose

This review paper addresses three major challenges hindering progress in the field of social-emotional learning in education.

Design/Approach/Methods

We first discuss how social-emotional skills could be conceptualized, contrasting identity versus self-efficacy approaches. Second, we argue to develop more objective assessments of social-emotional skills and their development, as a supplement of currently and frequently used self- and informant descriptions relying on Likert-based scales. Third and finally, we discuss recurrent issues that are raised when debating the implementation of social-emotional skill learning in the classroom.

Findings

The review suggests that, at this point in time, both self-efficacy and identity conceptualizations of social-emotional skills are valuable approaches. Future research will need to explore which conceptualization for which skills demonstrates the best predictive validity, taking into account the nature of outcomes and contexts. The desired characteristics of more objective social-emotional skill measures are defined, and we encourage to examine how these overlap with self-reports using construct maps. Finally, we underscore the importance of having a comprehensive and evidence-informed taxonomy of social-emotional skills to guide the debate on the inclusion of social-emotional skill learning in curricula and its implementation in the classroom.

Originality/Value

This short review is primarily written for practitioners and policymakers to give a quick and accessible update on the key challenges in social-emotional learning today. The review should trigger more in-depth reading on the topic, but also support readers to understand current problems and help them dealing with questions and potential objections that might be raised by different stakeholders.