Relevance of Socio-Emotional Skills in the Chilean Educational System

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

Abstract

The relevance that social-emotional skills have acquired in different contexts necessarily implies that there is a positive look of these aspects. In other words, the socio-emotional, is understood as a structural ability of human beings, a feature that, if properly worked, implies, in the long term, personal "success" in different spheres of life. In that sense, the measurement and work focused on non-academic aspects is relatively new in the Chilean educational system.

The notion that it is relevant to evaluate aspects that go beyond academic knowledge is supported by the importance they have on people’s lives, and the appropriate development of society and democracy. Bassi et al. (2012), explain that the development of these skills has proven to be crucial for an optimal insertion in the labor market, since in addition to the academic skills that the school must provide, employers are looking for a series of related social-emotional skills in young people, which contribute to a successful labor insertion.

In this sense, given that the educational establishments are a space for transmitting values, and where skills are trained and promoted to develop citizenship, coexistence and democratic participation (MINEDUC, 2004), from 2014 non-academic skills were included in the Chilean school system, through the Indicators of Personal and Social Development (IDPS in Spanish). The Chilean Ministry of Education states that these indicators are tasked with the assessment of learning outcomes related to the personal and social sphere, including these "non-cognitive" abilities. In that sense, the indicators have the following role in the evaluation of the quality of education:

• Provide educational establishments with relevant information on the personal and social environment of their students.
• They are considered in a Performance Category, which allows identifying those establishments that require support and must be visited by the Agency to receive improvement guidelines.
• Contribute to the design and evaluation of public policies and thus provide relevant information at the national level for educational research.

The law defines eight indicators, four obtained from administrative sources and four measured by self-reported questionnaires. The four indicators measured by students, teachers, and parents questionnaires, and officially reported since 2014, are academic self-esteem and school motivation, school climate, participation and citizenship education and healthy lifestyle

During the presentation I’ll detail the nationwide implementation of the IDPS, as well as of the main results of a study conducted on a sample of 7th grade students, who were answered a socio-emotional skills questionnaire constructed from the theoretical framework of the Big Five.

The results obtained by the questionnaire were correlated with the Personal and Social Development Indicators scores of the same students, through a multilevel analysis, in order to explore the relationships between socio-emotional skills and the Chilean national indicators.

Bassi, M., M.Busso, S.Urzúa y J.Vargas (2012), Disconnected. Skills, Education and Employment in Latin America, IDB.
Ministerio de Educación de Chile. (2004). Informe Comisión Formación Ciudadana. Santiago: Chile.

Authors

• Pedro Felipe Moreno Gomez

• Carolina Leyton, National Agency for Educational Quality