Emotional trainning program in middle-school students with low academic performance

Emotional management is considered one of the emerging challenges in current society. In this sense, the educational field appears as one of the pioneers designing and implementing of programs to promote its development, favoring in the students’ social and personal skills (Guil and Gil-Olarte, 2007). According to current educational laws in Spain, educational administrations should promote the maximum personal, intellectual, social, and emotional development of students (Organic Educational Law 2/2006, of May 3, modified by the Organic Law 9/2013, of 9 December, for the Improvement of Educational Quality). However, in Middle School (in Spain Secondary Mandatory School, ESO) we find few programs that address this integral development. Moreover, these students have special educational needs in order to achieve academic performance due, among others, to emotional competencies and social skills deficits (Santamaría and Valdés, 2017). Specifically, in Andalusia, students of Basic Vocational Training, usually present high rates of absenteeism, as well as poor motivation, self-concept, self-esteem, and social skills (Junta de Andalucía, 2018). To respond to this situation, we propose a pilot project aimed to increase academic achievement and socio-academic adaptation through emotional competencies. This project has been developed with five students from eighth grade (second year of Spanish ESO) that met the basic criteria to begin Basic Vocational Training next academic year. In this way, students’ emotional competencies will be developed through the reinforcement of instrumental and fundamental curricular subjects, complementary to formal education.