Designing Social and Emotional Skills Training

Abstract

Social and emotional skills are crucial for all aspects of our everyday life. However, understanding how digital technology can facilitate the development and learning of such skills is yet an under-researched area in HCI. To start addressing this gap, this paper reports on a series of interviews and design workshops with the leading researchers and developers of 'Social and Emotional Learning' (SEL) curricula. SEL is a subfield of educational psychology with a long history of teaching such skills, and a range of evidence based curricula that are widely deployed in primary and secondary schools. We identify the shared challenges across existing curricula that digital technology might help address: the support for out-of-session learning, scaffolding for parental engagement, and feedback for the curricula developers. We argue how this presents an opportunity for mutually beneficial collaborations, with the potential for significant real-world impact of novel HCI systems, and can inform HCI work on supporting social and emotional skills development in other domains.

"I just let him cry...

“…However, research around the potential of digital technology to support the development of social-emotional competencies at home for typically developing children has been limited in the HCI community [130,133]. The few recent relevant projects include the design of an interactive artifact created to support social-emotional learning in children aged 3-6 years [137], and the development of an intelligent social tutoring system (ISTS) designed to assess and build prosocial skills for children aged 7-12 years [26].…”

“…Psychologically, such 'situated interventions' would correspond to the need for experiential learning that underpins all socio-emotional competencies [29,70,79,130,153]). As outlined in Section 2.2.3, the limitations of learning 'outside' of the emotional experiences are well known in SEL: the current model of role plays, vignettes and similar techniques during workshops are, in fact, an explicit attempt to generate the necessary emotional material at least to some degree (cf., [8,133]). For example, the interviews indicate that the reliance on disengagement and distraction oers a possible locale for a situated interventions.…”

“…Most mental health disorders are chronic and begin early in life (75% before the age of 18 years), and this realisation is fuelling calls by national governments and international organisations for preventative interventions in childhood [99,104,152]. Although the psychological mechanisms to develop protective factors against mental health disorders are relatively well understood and evidence-based interventions exist (see [33,149] for reviews), only little is known about the potential of technology to address some of the critical challenges remaining -including those of access, engagement, and training costs that prevention programs face when trying to reach families of young children [130,133]. As such, it is not clear if/how technology could be used to facilitate transfer of such learning from school into families (cf.…”

Reflective Practicum

“…Second, we illustrate how these core aspects of the reflective practicum can serve as a useful sensitising concept [4] to help identify the mechanisms supporting transformative reflection in other settings. In particular, we retrospectively analyse the findings of two long term (24+ months) case studies unpacking the learning processes, challenges and opportunities for technology in two social-emotional learning contexts: masters counsellor training [39] and primary school education [36][37][38].…”

Psychophysiological measures of mental effort and emotion within user research

“…Additionally, because emotion is an essential piece of the rational thought process, understanding one's own emotional state can help improve general thinking for any individual with a low EQ (Damasio, 2005;LeDoux, 1996). Improving emotional skills training is an area of increased importance in efforts to highlight areas where technology can have the largest impact (Slovák, Gilad-Bachrach, & Fitzpatrick, 2015).…”