Browsing by Author "Tuohilampi, Kaisa"

Emotional and interaction skills, or social and emotional skills, help school children to become aware of their feelings, create positive relationships and make responsible decisions. All of these skills are needed to success in life and school. There has been a great deal of intervention research in teaching social and emotional skills, but it is still unclear how these skills are learned and can be taught effectively so that as many children as possible can benefit from these skills. More research data is needed on how different aspects of social and emotional skills (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making) develop during socio-emotional skills interventions. The aim of this study is to continue Burakoff’s Master’s thesis in the spring of 2021, in which students who participated in social and emotional intervention were divided into three different skill level groups. Burakoff found that those who rated themselves as weak improved the most in socio-emotional skills, but surprisingly, those who rated themselves as good improved the least. Burakoff viewed developments in socio-emotional skills as a whole. The purpose of this study is to examine the development of students’ social and emotional skills when viewed through five different socio-emotional domains and at three different skill levels. The secondary data used in this study were collected from five different European countries and the data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. The results obtained are in line with Burakoff's finding, as looking at the different domains, the intervention has succeeded in developing the different domains of socio-emotional skills statistically significantly only in the group of weak. In the group of good, all domains decreased statistically significantly. The results did not suggest that the domains developed in a certain order, but it seems that social awareness would be the domain that developed the most of the sub-areas with the intervention. In addition, in the group of good, self- awareness may have increased as a result of the intervention.