Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1529083
This article is part of the Research Topic Scales Validation in the Context of Inclusive Education View all 6 articles

Digitally Assessing Social-Emotional Skills in Early School Years: Initial Validation of a Screening Instrument

Provisionally accepted

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Social-emotional skills are essential in everyday interaction and develop in early and middle childhood. However, there is no German instrument to help primary school students identify their strengths and weaknesses in different social-emotional skills that does not rely on written language. This paper introduces a new digital instrument, the GraSEF: Grazer Screening to assess Social-Emotional Skills, which was developed to measure (1) Behavior in Social Situations, (2) Prosocial Behavior, (3) Emotion Regulation Strategies, (4) Emotion Recognition and (5) Self-Perception of Emotions using different test formats (e.g., situational judgement test, self-assessment, performance tests). In the GraSEF, students work through an online survey tool, using audio instructions to guide them through the test. The present study analyses the responses of 68 second graders (Mage = 8.23 years, SDage = 0.48, 48% female). The intention was to gain initial insight into the instrument's psychometric quality and user-friendliness. In general, the instrument was found to have acceptable to good internal consistency, sufficient discriminatory power and item difficulty. However, one subtest (5: Self-Perception of Emotions), as well as three situations of the situational judgment test (1: Behavior in Social Situations), were excluded due to unsatisfactory fit and distribution. The validity check revealed low to moderate correlations between teacher rating and student scores. On average, students completed the screening in about 30 minutes and provided positive feedback regarding usability. While the small sample size only provides preliminary insight into the instrument's psychometric quality, the results suggest that the GraSEF can reliably measure various dimensions of social-emotional skills in second graders, even among those with low reading skills.

    Keywords: assessment, Social-emotional skills, Emotion Regulation, primary school, Digital instrument

    Received: 15 Nov 2024; Accepted: 21 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Kogler, Gasteiger-Klicpera, Prinz and Paleczek. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Andrea Kogler, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.