A Latent Profile Analysis to Report Students' Socio-Emotional Skills to Higher Education Institutions in Mexico

• In Event: 15.054 - Current International Practices and Challenges on Socio-Emotional Learning

Abstract

One important aspect of the evaluation of SEL in higher education is the dissemination of the results in such a way that the information is easy to interpret by the general public and that it is useful for practitioners in decision-making. To face this communication challenge, we conducted a latent profile analysis (Vermunt & Magidson, 2012) on 651,515 college applicants to identify the underlying groups defined by their socio-emotional skills, such as academic engagement (Furrer, C., Skinner, E., & Pitzer, J., 2014), academic perseverance (Duckworth, A., Peterson, C., Matthews, M., & Kelly, D., 2007), metacognition (Coutinho, S., 2007), internal locus of control (Coleman, M., & DeLeire, T., 2003), and cultural and economic capital (Caro, D. H., Sandoval-Hernández, A., & Lüdtke, O., 2014). We examined the relationship between the identified profiles and academic performance measured by a college entrance exam that includes four areas: analytical thinking, mathematical thinking, language structure and reading comprehension.
We found six latent profiles that were shown to be differentially associated with academic performance; two subgroups showed high academic performance, two subgroups had intermediate academic performance and two had low performance. In each of these pairs, we found that one subgroup had high SEL scores while the other subgroup showed low SEL scores; i.e. we identified subgroups with similar level of academic performance but with different performance on the SEL scales. Additionally, we found that academic performance was related to cultural and economic capital as expected; the higher the cultural and economic capital scores the higher the academic performance (Caro, D. H., Sandoval-Hernández, A., & Lüdtke, O., 2014).
This study proposes the use of profiles of students to communicate the information about social-emotional skills and their relationship with academic performance in a way that is clear and easy to interpret. We will discuss the implications of the results in the Mexican context that is characterized by large social disparities in which fairness issues revolve about comparisons between students of very different socioeconomic status.

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Caro, D. H., Sandoval-Hernández, A., & Lüdtke, O. (2014). Cultural, social, and economic capital constructs in international assessments: An evaluation using exploratory structural equation modeling. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25(3), 433-450.
Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals.Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(6), 1087.
Furrer, C. J., Skinner, E. A., & Pitzer, J. R. (2014). The influence of teacher and peer relationships on students’ classroom engagement and everyday motivational resilience. National Society for the Study of Education, 113(1), 101-123.
Coleman, M., & DeLeire, T. (2003). An economic model of locus of control and the human capital investment decision. Journal of Human Resources, 38(3), 701-721.
Vermunt, J. K., & Magidson, J. (2012). Upgrade manual for Latent Gold Choice 5.0: Basic, advanced, and syntax. Statistical Innovations Inc., Belmont Massachusetts.

Author

• Ingrid García, Ceneval