Parent and Caregiver Conceptualizations of Social and Emotional Skill Programs. ACT Research. Data Byte

Social and emotional (SE) skills are interpersonal, self-regulatory, and task-related behaviors that are important for adaption to and successful performance in educational and workplace settings (Casillas et al., 2015). Students can improve these skills through social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions or programming designed to teach SE skill development to students in school settings (e.g., Mahoney et al., 2018). While teaching SEL shows promising results and continues to gain traction in the K-12 education space, little consensus exists on what label should be used to describe this skill set (e.g., Berg et al., 2017). A recent study with parents suggests that, although support for social and emotional learning (SEL)-related skills is relatively strong, the label "social-emotional learning" itself is unfavorable (Tyner, 2021). This conclusion was based on a rank order item which presented parents with a list of 12 undefined, SEL-related program titles and asked them to select three school programs they would most and least want their child enrolled in. To test the assumption that respondents perceived all program labels as teaching SEL, the authors conducted a survey with parents and caregivers of ACT® test takers. Results from this follow-up study demonstrate that the program label "life skills" represents a far broader range of skills than those we would typically conceptualize as SE skills. While skills such as financial management, completing taxes, and taking care of homes and automobiles are undoubtedly important, they are fundamentally different from SE skills such as persistence, empathy, and resilience. [For the 2021 study "How to Sell SEL: Parents and the Politics of Social-Emotional Learning," see ED616280.]