How One Feels (HOF)

Children’s social and emotional competence

We define social and emotional competence as the ability to feel, manage, recognize and reflect over your own and others’ feelings in social situations, and to use this ability when taking action.

As social and emotional learning is widely spreading across Europe, there is a need for an easy-to-use instrument aimed  at large groups of students. So far, there are no such instruments for measuring children’s social and emotional competence. Thanks to EAP_SEL project, which has been funded by European Union, an instrument has been developed, which will, in the longer run, be used by primary school teachers all over Europe to assess children’s social and emotional competence.

One such instrument has been developed for children and youth aged 11-16 (see Sandell et al. (2012): Psychometric analysis of a measure of socio-emotional development in adolescents, Educational Psychology in Practice: theory, research and practice in educational psychology, 28:4, 395-410). The new can be used by pupils aged 6-10 (primary school). It consists of 10 vignettes, where the children can answer what they think the person in the vignette feels, and, consequently, what he or she will do.

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