Development of a Rating Scale to Assess the Social and Emotional Skills of Elementary School Children

Abstract

This study focused on achieving the goal of “social and emotional skills” presented by the OECD (2015), including collaboration with others, and the subordinate constructs for emotional control (patience, self-control, passion for achieving goals, sociability, respect, compassion, self-esteem, optimism, and confidence). The study aimed to develop a rating scale to assess the social and emotional skills of children in the middle and upper grades of elementary school. The preliminary study examined constructs and their validities for the questions used in the scale and extracted 44 in total. This study used the test-retest method to analyze the reliability of 755 data points collected from children in the middle and upper grades of elementary schools. The ICC was within a range of 67–90 for all the questions, confirming temporal stability. The exploratory factor analysis showed that Cronbach's alpha coefficient was .60 or above for every factor, ensuring reliability within factors. Next, the study analyzed the exploratory and confirmatory factors and extracted the following seven factors (a total of 21 items): self-esteem, sociability, respect, compassion, patience, self-control, and passion for achieving a goal, which matched the model that identifies social and emotional skills (GFI=.954, AGFI=.937, CFI=.965, RMSEA=.042). These findings suggest that the rating scale to assess social and emotional skills developed in this study has sufficient credibility and validity (construct validity) to measure and evaluate the social and emotional skills of elementary school children.