SENNA Inventory for the Assessment of Social and Emotional Skills in Public School Students in Brazil: Measuring Both Identity and Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Responding to the need for school-based, broadly applicable, low-cost, and brief assessments of socio-emotional skills, we describe the conceptual background and empirical development of the SENNA inventory and provide new psychometric information on its internal structure. Data were obtained through a computerized survey from 50,000 Brazilian students enrolled in public school grades 6 to 12, spread across the entire State of São Paulo. The SENNA inventory was designed to assess 18 particular skills (e.g., empathy, responsibility, tolerance of frustration, and social initiative), each operationalized by nine items that represent three types of items: three positively keyed trait-identity items, three negatively keyed identity items, and three (always positively keyed) self-efficacy items, totaling a set of 162 items. Results show that the 18 skill constructs empirically defined a higher-order structure that we interpret as the social-emotional Big Five, labeled as Engaging with Others, Amity, Self-Management, Emotional Regulation, and Open-Mindedness. The same five factors emerged whether we assessed the 18 skills with items representing (a) a trait-identity approach that emphasizes lived skills (what do I typically do?) or (b) a self-efficacy approach that emphasizes capability (how well can I do that?). Given that its target youth group is as young as 11 years old (grade 6), a population particularly prone to the response bias of acquiescence, SENNA is also equipped to correct for individual differences in acquiescence, which are shown to systematically bias results when not corrected.

Social–emotional skills of teachers: Mapping the content space and defining taxonomy requirements

“…A teacher SEMS taxonomy should form the starting point to write a comprehensive set of teacher SEMS items that can be administered to both tenured and teachers-in-training to examine its underlying dimensional structure. Similar procedures like those adopted by Primi et al (2017Primi et al ( , 2021 for the construction of a SEMS taxonomy for students can be followed to analyze the multidimensional structure of such item set. The resulting dimensions will form the cornerstones of a new empirical teacher SEMS taxonomy, that has solved the jingle-jangle fallacy and accommodates the numerous more narrow perspectives on teacher skills and training.…”

“…Due to various assessment challenges (Duckworth and Yeager, 2015;Greiff and Kyllonen, 2016;Abrahams et al, 2019), such a tool will preferably use a 360-degree multi-informant approach including self-ratings and multiple observer-ratings (e.g., students, supervisors, directors, see Pancorbo and De Fruyt, 2021). Additionally, due to their sensitivity for response styles, such as acquiescence (Primi et al, 2021), faking, and bandwidth-fidelity problems (Cronbach and Gleser, 1965) additional methods of assessment, beyond the traditional self-report questionnaires using Likert ratings, should be considered (see Abrahams et al, 2019, for more detail), such as for example situational judgment formats.…”