Social Emotional Assets, Personality Traits, and Student Engagement in Higher Education

• In Event: Leveraging Social-Emotional Learning in Higher Education for Inclusive Excellence and Civic Engagement

Abstract

Theoretical Framework
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in young adulthood is conceptualized as adaptive interpersonal and self-regulatory skills that are malleable over time (CASEL, 2012). Despite this, recent SEL assessment strategies have included personality indices such as the Big Five Factors (OECD, 2018) and the HEXACO model (McAbee, 2019) which are measures of stable traits (Lee, 2019). To better assess change and growth in young adulthood, a new measure (Social Emotional Assets – SEA) was created to measures competencies that are 1) changeable, 2) interpersonally adaptive, and 3) culturally robust. The SEA scale contains 6 factors (awareness, calmness, compassion, optimism, assertiveness, and prudence) and have been found to be associated with student engagement (Hughes, et al., 2019).

Objectives
The current study examined the 1) inter-associations of the SEA, the Big Five, and the HEXACO models of personality and 2) the predictive associations of each scale with student outcomes of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement.

Methods
Two samples of N = 427 and N = 444 university students (82% women, 49% white, 85% heterosexual, 40% first-generation) from Western Canada were invited to participate in an online survey.

Materials
Measures across both samples included self-reports of teacher quality (Law, 2011); sense of belonging (CUSC, 2015); anxiety (Mills et al, 2014); grit (Duckworth et al., 2012); behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement (Lam et al., 2014); and the SEA scale (Hughes et al., 2019). Sample one completed the TIPI Big Five assessment (Ehrhart et al., 2009), and sample two completed the HEXACO (Lee & Ashton, 2004).

Results
SEA scores were associated with lower anxiety, higher grit, higher sense of belonging, and higher engagement. SEA scores were inter-associated with the TIPI and HEXACO subscales (see Table 1) but passed multi-collinearity checks. To investigate whether SEA remained a significant predictor of engagement after controlling for personality, a structural equation model was conducted for each sample. For both models, anxiety, grit, sense of belonging and teacher quality were control variables, SEA was the predictor, and engagement was the outcome. SEA remained a significant predictor after controlling for TIPI scores (X2 (12) = 16.56, p = .17, TLI = .99, CFI = .99, RMSEA = .019, Adjusted R2 Behavioral Engagement = .50, Adjusted R2 Emotional Engagement = .47), and HEXACO scores (X2 (24) = 30.64, p = .17, TLI = .99, CFI = .99, RMSEA = .016, Adjusted R2 Behavioral Engagement = .50, Adjusted R2 Emotional Engagement = .52, Adjusted R2 Cognitive Engagement = .46).

Scholarly Significance
Results indicate that the SEA is a unique predictor of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement in university students even when assessing traditional indices of personality. This may indicate that the SEA assesses traits that are more directly linked with academic engagement and performance in emerging adulthood, such as assertiveness, optimism, and compassion for others. Higher SEA scores were also linked with positive evaluations of teacher quality and sense of belonging, which may help students to feel more positively about their learning environment.

Authors

• Kathleen Hughes, University of Calgary

• Jusnoor Aujla, University of Calgary