Measuring what matters: Understanding the nuances of social and emotional skills prioritized by children, parents and teachers in Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, and Liberia

• In Event: Beyond letters and numbers: Conceptualizing and measuring the inputs and outcomes of play across contexts

Abstract

Interventions that are focused on play-based learning can have a marked positive impact on the social and emotional development of children (Kirk & Jay, 2018; Lee et al., 2020). This is especially important since programs focused on supporting children’s SEL skills can help children deal with the adverse physiological and psychological effects of being exposed to the risk factors that come with living through emergencies (Baker-Henningham, Walker, Powell, & Gardner, 2009; Jordans et al., 2010; Puerta, Valerio, & Bernal, 2016; Torrente et al., 2019). However, how SEL skills are defined, codified, and operationalized in research and how these conceptualizations are translated in program and practice are not always consistent or agreed upon. This trend is partly because SEL skills are highly socially normative and dependent on the environment within which they are expressed (Jones, Zaslow, Darling-Churchill, & Halle, 2016). The context-specificity of SEL skills affects how they are measured as well. In the absence of a more nuanced understanding of how SEL skills manifest in a specific context, some measures may be mischaracterized or biased. A majority of the measures that have been developed for SEL and wellbeing were initially developed for use in high-resource, stable contexts (Halle & Darling-Churchill, 2016); the measures that are regularly used in low-resource and fragile contexts often do not sufficiently capture the dimensions of identified SEL skills (Jukes et al., 2018, Lee, Yang, & Zuilkowski, 2019). To address these issues, our research—Contextually Relevant Emotional and Social Wellbeing Tools (CREST)—is focused on working with the education ecosystem in Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, and Liberia to address the following research questions:

1.How do primary school-age children, parents, and educators define social and emotional skills important in the lives of children?
2. What are feasible steps to transform these context-specific definitions into assessments of these constructs?
3. What are the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of these context-specific social and emotional measures?

In the panel, we focus on findings for the first research question. In each country we focused on 9-12 school communities. We conducted 18-24 focus group discussion (FGDs) with primary grade children, and a similar number of FGDs with parents and teachers. In these FGD’s participants were asked to think about a child who they think is doing well in life (does not have to be someone who has strong academic skills) and list the skills/qualities that helps this child do well. We then conducted a participant ranking exercise to identify three skills from each FGD that participants ranked as the highest. Participants then defined each skill and provided examples of what this skill looked like in practice. Our initial analysis suggests that there are strong thematic similarities in the SEL skills identified across contexts: while children tend to focus on interpersonal, relational skills, adults focus more on intrapersonal skills that are associated with social order and behavioral control. We discuss the implications of these findings for co-creating SEL measures with partners from the education ecosystem in each country.

Author

• Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame
  Presenting Author