What is it about?
Achievement grows from year to year in children and youth but what about social and emotional competencies? We had data on almost 100,000 youth and showed dips in self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness during the middle school years. Then, these competencies showed rises into the high school years. What's surprising is that we didn't see these same trends for growth mindset. Further analyses compared students with parents with higher versus lower education. Youth with parents with higher levels of education reported higher levels of most social and emotional competencies but there were no group differences in growth. We also looked at gender and growth in social and emotional competencies. The most interesting finding on gender was that girls were higher in self-efficacy for learning than boys in fourth grade but by sixth and seventh grade, the trend was reversed and boys had higher self-efficacy than girls. The work is based on students' self-report of their competencies which gives crucial information about youth's lived experience. Further, the sample is larger and more racially/ethnically diverse than virtually any other study on the topic. Psychologist and educators need information about what youth are thinking and feeling and this work makes a crucial contribution in that regard.
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Why is it important?
These results are crucial for understanding youth needs in middle schools. At the transition to middle school, students feel less capable of meeting academic challenges. They are highly sensitive to issues of status (Yeager, 2017), can be very intolerant of others’ points of view and may find it difficult to pay attention unless the work is especially engaging and meaningful. Given these psychological conditions, it is important to offer meaningful instruction that matters to youth (Ward-Seidel et al., 2024).
Perspectives
In the year 2000, Chip Wood, a thought-leader in the field of Social and Emotional Learning and author of Yardsticks asked me, “Do we have good information on how social and emotional competencies change over the course of development?” I dug out a few papers but I wasn’t very happy with the information that I could find – the samples were small and mostly included white students only so they didn’t generalize that well to students of color. Plus, the studies measured social and emotional competencies differently at different time points. I kept Chip’s idea in mind for a very long time. Voilá – just 24 years later, we have an answer to this question based on a sample of almost 100,000 students in California. Our hope is that this work will contribute in important ways to the field of social and emotional learning.
Sara Rimm-Kaufman
University of Virginia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Social and emotional competency development from fourth to 12th grade: Relations to parental education and gender., American Psychologist, May 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/amp0001357.
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