Browsing by Author "Saarinen, Nuppu-Marie"

This study is a part of Learning to be (L2B) project evaluation. L2B project is Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and it is providing practices and methodologies for assessing social emotional and health (SHE) skills at schools. This study is concentrated on the project’s pre-test questionnaire’s section that was used to measure students’ social emotional competence (SEC). The instrument that was used to measure students’ SEC, was the Social and Emotional Competence Questionnaire (SECQ), that is based on the CASEL (as cited in Zhou & Ee, 2012, p. 28) model of social emotional learning (SEL). In the CASEL (2019) model, SEL is used to improve students’ SEC. In a previous study, the SECQ meter has been noticed to be potential instrument to measure SEC, but a follow up research with more versatile sample of respondents from various cultural backgrounds is needed, as well as examining the validity of the meter (Zhou & Ee, 2012). This study is responding to these needs as Learning to be project is examining students’ SEC in five European countries. Additionally, previous study has shown, that the SECQ might not function as well with younger as with older students (Zhou & Ee, 2012). Therefore, in this study, the students’ perceptions of their SEC will be compared between younger and older students. The functionality of the SECQ in both age groups will also be compared. The purpose of this study was to examine, how the students participating in L2B project perceived their SEC in the pre-test phase of the project, how well did the SECQ measure SEC, were there any differences between younger and older students in perceptions of their SEC and whether the SECQ functioned equally in both age groups. In L2B the data was collected from nearly 1500 students aged 8–15 from 20 different schools from each of the five participating countries. In SECQ students responded on a scale 1–6 (1 = completely false, 6 = completely true) to claims describing good social emotional skills. From the descriptive statistics of the SECQ data, conclusions about students’ perceptions of their SEC were made. With the same data, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted to investigate the functionality of the SECQ and if the different subscales factored complying with an original scale. To compare different age groups, the students were divided into two groups: aged 8–11 and aged 12–15. The perceptions of students’ SEC in these two age groups were compared with independent-samples testing and the functionality of the SECQ with reliability analyses by comparing the SECQ data’s Cronbach’s alpha (α) values in different age groups. In the pre-test phase of L2B project, the students perceived their SEC to be fairly good on average. Consequently, there still is room for improving students’ SEC and it is possible to expect, that the SEL intervention in L2B project will improve students’ SEC. In this study, the SECQ turned out to function quite well and the factoring did comply mostly with the original scale. The result indicates that the SECQ can be used as a valid instrument for measuring SEC. Younger and older students seemed to have somewhat differing perceptions of their SEC, but in this study, it is left unclear, whether the differences were due to the age per se or merely the large sample size. This should be examined with more versatile and accurate methods. The functionality of SECQ measure seemed also to have differences between age groups, in order that the SECQ seemed to function slightly poorer with younger than with older students. Altogether, the measure turned out to be functionable for examining SEC, regardless of the respondents’ age.