Importance of Social Skills in the Prevention of Risk Situations and Academic Achievement in Secondary Education in Spain: What Do Teachers Expect from Their Students? How Can Coexistence and Well-Being Be Improved?

Multi-Informant Assessment of Adolescents’ Social–Emotional Skills: Patterns of Agreement and Discrepancy among Teachers, Parents, and Students

“…These estimates of reliability reflect those recorded in the validation sample and are consistent with SSIS-SR alpha coefficients [1,9,32,33]. As with the SSIS-RS [9], validity evidence for the SESAS-SS has been provided by factorial analyses [6], which ratify its structure, and correlational studies with the Behavior Assessment System for Children [34,35], which records lower to moderate correlations, particularly with clinical subscales.…”

“…Theoretically, research on children's social and emotional skills has been substantially influenced by Bandura's social learning theory [4] and currently is influenced by more applied models of social-emotional learning such as that advanced in the CASEL competency framework [5]. These approaches to characterizing social-emotional behavior emphasize clusters of social skills that are largely observable behaviors expected to correlate positively with prosocial outcomes and academic performance, while correlating negatively with emotional behaviors such as internalizing and externalizing [6].…”

“…That is, successful development of social skills involves children learning to discriminate what are appropriate and effective behaviors in different settings. Two of the most important settings for children are home and school, hence the high interest in using parents and teachers, along with children themselves, in the assessment of social skills across multiple settings [6].…”

“…Even when events are nominally identical, parents and teachers may view the same behavior and interpret events differently, as raters attend to the conditions that elicit behaviors [22]. In addition, cultural values may also modulate the importance that informants give to different SS, as reported by Mudarra and García-Salguero when finding that in terms of academic success, both Spanish and US teachers assigned considerable importance to cooperation [6,23], yet they differed in their rating of self-control and assertion. Elliott et al [24] found that parents' observations of their children's social-emotional skills based on social interactions within a family are potentially rich, but parents typically have not been included in universal SEL screenings conducted by schools.…”