Social-emotional skills (SE skills) have received increasing attention in educational research due to their contribution to students’ mental and physical well-being, academic success and employability (e.g. Chernyshenko et al., 2018; Moffitt et al., 2011; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); 2021). The development of SE skills as an explicit outgrowth in education has become a new important focus, next to supporting students’ mastery in sciences, languages, mathematics and arts (Abrahams et al., 2019). Scholars and policy makers have argued for more attention to students’ SE skills in recent years. The need for SE skills such as self-management, collaboration, emotion regulation and stress resistance among others have been highlighted (De Fruyt, 2019) for students in order to cope with the challenges of today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (Primi et al., 2021) and to be able to apply their knowledge in unknown and evolving circumstances (OECD, 2018).

However, despite the importance of SE skills, the measurement of those skills is still associated with several conceptual and methodological challenges, e.g. no consensus on the nature and amount of the constructs necessary to cover the social-emotional competencies (Abrahams et al., 2019; Kyllonen et al., 2014; Müller et al., 2020; Primi et al., 2016). Over the past decades, several authors have proposed more than a hundred SE skills taxonomies and frameworks (Berg et al., 2017), that differ by the number and nature of the domains and facets included (Abrahams et al., 2019).

In order to better understand and systematically enhance the development of students’ SE skills, educators need valid tools enabling them to assess and monitor those skills. Considering that an appropriate assessment tool needs to be relevant to the context in which it is applied, there is a need for instruments enabling assessment of SE skills in school context and on facet level, rather than assessing SE skills in a general, not-specified context and on the broad domains level. We selected two representative frameworks – Primi et al.’s (2017) and OECD’s framework (Chernyshenko et al., 2018), which focus on specific skills of school-aged children and youth (Abrahams et al., 2019) on a facet level rather than broad skill domains, as using those frameworks offers potential for deeper understanding of social and emotional skill development and in addition, can provide insights for educational settings on developing and monitoring those skills in schools and classrooms. Based on these two frameworks, a self-reported instrument was developed to assess nine selected SE skills: self-control, responsibility, persistence, emotional control, stress resistance, empathy, cooperation, trust, and assertiveness. This set of nine skills was selected according to the general competences stated in Estonian National curriculum for basic schools (2011) and the results of previous research on SE skills (Chernyshenko et al., 2018; Kankaraš & Suarez-Alvarez, 2019).

Our aim in this study was to develop an instrument for assessing lower secondary school students’ SE skills in school context and on facet level and to evaluate the psychometric properties of the instrument, focusing on the internal validation of the instrument. To approach this aim, we formulated the following research questions:

1. Which factors can be empirically specified in characterising students’ SE skills according to the frameworks and skills chosen for the developed SE skills instrument?

2. Does the instrument enable invariant measurement of SE skills in two grades (grade 6 and grade 9)?

3. Are there any differences between the self-reported levels of SE skills of 6th and 9th grade students? 

The data was collected from 6th and 9th grade students from January to April 2022 as a part of a larger research project. The study had the approval of the Ethics Committee. Informed consent was obtained from students and their parents. Participants were from 12 purposively selected schools from different regions of Estonia. The sample consisted of 521 students (281 girls and 240 boys). 272 were 6-graders and 249 were 9-graders. Typical age of Estonian 6-graders is 12-13 years, and of 9-graders 15-16 years. A self-report instrument was developed to assess nine SE skills: self-control, responsibility, persistence, emotional control, stress resistance, empathy, cooperation, trust, and assertiveness. The instrument development had two phases: 1) selection of frameworks and skills and development of items and 2) pilot study. Based on the piloting, we developed the revised version of the instrument, which consists of 9 facets and 34 items. The theoretical model of SE skills was tested using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The goodness of fit of models was evaluated by using chi-squared statistic (χ2), the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), the comparative fit index (CFI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA). For testing the invariance of the measurement model parameters across grades, multiple-group CFA was conducted. The resulting invariance models were compared with respect to their chi-square statistics, CFI and RMSEA. Results. CFA with all 34 items – 9-factor model – showed acceptable fit indices (χ2/df = 2.02, RMSEA = .044, CFI = .937, TLI = .928). We then tested the second-order model, the general dimensions (4-factor) model and finally the unidimensional factor model. The results indicate that the correlated factor model with 9 factors is the one with the best fit. Composite reliability (CR) was calculated for all the 9 factors of the instrument. CR values for seven of the nine factors varied from 0.7 to 0.86, ensuring adequate internal consistency. We tested for configural, metric and scalar invariance, and considering the differences in goodness-of-fit statistics between invariance models, accepted the scalar invariance model. The results of the independent samples t-test showed that a significant difference between grades (t = 4.155, p < 0.01) exists in the Self-control facet, indicating that students from the younger cohort (M = 3.53, SD = 0.697) reported higher self-control levels than students from the older cohort (M = 3.28, SD = 0.668). There were no significant differences between the grade groups regarding the other eight SE skills factors.

The CFA results supported the 9-factor structure of the SE skills instrument and confirmed the construct validity of the proposed model. Multiple group CFA was used to investigate measurement invariance of the developed instrument in 6-th-grade and 9-th grade students. The previously established 9-factor structure of the instrument showed acceptable fit in both samples. The results suggest that the instrument measured same skills across different grades, and the scores of 6th and 9th grade students were directly comparable. This is important, as adolescent years are claimed to be the focal period for supporting and monitoring the development of SE skills (Napolitano et al., 2021) and our instrument enables comparing the SE skills ratings of lower secondary school students. Students’ self-ratings of SE skills were mostly similar in grade 6 and grade 9. For one facet -self-control - the younger cohort reported significantly higher levels than the older cohort. This is partially consistent with the previous studies by Soto et al. (2011), which indicated that self-control shows decrease during adolescence. The current study has offered a SE skills instrument, which utilizes facet-level assessment approach, allows to provide specific information about different SE skills, and can be used for assessment and educational monitoring of students’ SE skills. The instrument could be enhanced by adding specific SE skills, like curiosity. Regarding the role of SE skills in educational outcomes, there is recent evidence that curiosity appears to be among the three most beneficial skills, in addition to self-control and persistence (Goa et al., 2023). This instrument can be further improved by cross-validation with teacher ratings for students’ SE skills. Future studies should focus on exploring students’ understandings and perceptions of different SE skills and the distinctive aspects, as well as possibilities for supporting the development of those skills to achieve more nuanced understanding.

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