Social-emotional skill assessment in children and adolescents: Advances and challenges in personality, clinical, and educational contexts.

Abstract

The development and promotion of social-emotional skills in childhood and adolescence contributes to subsequent well-being and positive life outcomes. However, the assessment of these skills is associated with conceptual and methodological challenges. This review discusses how social-emotional skill measurement in youth could be improved in terms of skills’ conceptualization and classification, and in terms of assessment techniques and methodologies. The first part of the review discusses various conceptualizations of social-emotional skills, demonstrates their overlap with related constructs such as emotional intelligence and the Big Five personality dimensions, and proposes an integrative set of social-emotional skill domains that has been developed recently. Next, methodological approaches that are innovative and may improve social-emotional assessments are presented, illustrated by concrete examples. We discuss how these innovations could advance social-emotional assessments, and demonstrate links to similar issues in related fields. We conclude the review by providing several concrete assessment recommendations that follow from this discussion.

Big Five Personality Traits Predict Successful Transitions From School to Vocational Education and Training: A Large-Scale Study

“…“Socio-emotional skills” is an umbrella term used to denote a broad set of individual difference constructs such as personality traits, motivation, and values. The common denominator of these constructs is that they refer to relatively consistent patterns of behavior, cognition, and affect that – although having a genetic basis – can be influenced by socialization and learning/experience, develop in interaction between environmental influences and biological predispositions, cannot easily be acquired, and have beneficial effects on relevant educational and life outcomes (see De Fruyt et al, 2015 ; Abrahams et al, 2019 ; Lechner et al, 2019 ). The Big Five framework ( Costa and McCrae, 1992 ; Goldberg, 1992 ) is currently the most established and well-validated model of personality traits and is often used as a guiding framework in studies on socio-emotional skills.…”

Temporal Stability of Grit and School Performance in Adolescents: A Longitudinal Perspective

“…Firstly, and generally, the potential biases of self-reports, including social desirability and acquiescence bias (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015;Suárez-Álvarez et al, 2018). In the future, to avoid these potential biases, the evaluation of noncognitive variables like grit could use other strategies such as ipsative tests, situational judgement tests, or "anchoring vignettes" (Abrahams et al, 2019;Kyllonen, 2015;Moreno et al, 2018). Another aspect to highlight is that it might be interesting for future research to consider students' cognitive capacity, given its significance in school performance (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2004;Heckman & Kautz, 2012;Rosander & Backstrom, 2014).…”

Incremental Validity of Character Measures Over the Big Five and Fluid intelligence in Predicting Academic Achievement

“…For example, individuals who report gritty behavior also tend to report conscientious behavior, and those who report higher levels of need for cognition also tend to perform a bit better on cognitive ability tasks (see Table 1 for more details). This construct overlap has prompted questions of whether character measures capture more than personality traits (Abrahams et al, 2019). It may be the case that different labels have been applied to the same construct (i.e., the jingle-jangle fallacy, see Marsh et al, 2019 for a recent analysis of this problem).…”