Abstract
Social emotional skills (SES) is comprehended as a multidimensional construct, composed of emotional, cognitive and behavioral variables that positively affect healthy development throughout the life span. Recent studies have shown that SES can be developed and learned. In this sense, there is currently a broad agreement that the educational system should not solely focus on cognitive development but also on the development of children and adolescents' social and emotional competencies. This technical note briefly describes the development process and the psychometric properties of six scales aiming to measure SES. The scales were designed to measure the Programa Semente - a newly developed Brazilian social emotional learning (SEL) program. The instruments measure the constructs proposed by Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL): self-knowledge, self-control, perseverance, empathy, responsible decision-making and prossocial behaviors. All the instruments presented evidence of validity based on the internal structure (factorial structure, reliability, configural, metric and scalar invariance) as well as based on external measures (convergent and/or concurrent validity). The final battery is composed of 45 items. Together, the constructs form a second-order factor, called SES, which, also, presented adequate goodness-of-fit indexes.
Keywords:
Social emotional skills; measurement; scale; CASEL; Programa Semente
