Students' Social and Emotional Skills in Educational Settings

Social and emotional skills are defined as “individual capacities that (a) are manifested in consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, (b) can be developed through formal and informal learning experiences, and (c) influence important socioeconomic outcomes throughout an individual’s life”. The importance of social and emotional skills in students’ life-long outcomes such as school achievement, psychological well-being, health and other life outcomes has become increasingly evident. For example, the improvement of learning is the central goal of Educational Psychology, with cognitive skill setting the stage for what is theoretically possible for the student to achieve. However, non-cognitive factors such as social and emotional skills also exert a great influence on students’ performance even above and beyond cognitive skills. And the complex interplay between social-emotional skills and cognitive skills is still under investigation. Therefore, developmental and educational researchers have increasingly become interested in various topics such as: What are the social and emotional skills? How do we measure social and emotional skills? What is the role of social and emotional skills on students’ various life outcomes? What kind of factors influence the development of students’ social and emotional skills? What can we do to improve students’ social and emotional skills?

This Research topic mainly aims to bring together cutting-edge research and innovative perspectives that address the following topics regarding social and emotional skills in educational settings, including but not limited to:

- The specific mechanisms underlying the relationships between cognitive and non-cognitive skills (e.g., social and emotional skills) in predicting various school and life outcomes.
- The short-term and long-term impact of social and emotional skills on various academic and non-academic outcomes.
- The factors from family, school, and individuals that may influence the development of social and emotional skills.
- Ambulatory assessments in social and emotional skills in school settings, such as experience sampling and daily dairy method or design situation-dependent behavioral tasks to measure the specific social and emotional skills.
- Novel interventions and educational programs for improving students’ social and emotional skills, including learning environment design, curriculum development, etc., and the evaluations of school-based interventions in different samples and diverse school settings.

We welcome the submission of includes reviews, theoretical opinion papers and original research papers, all aimed at understanding social and emotional skills.