Learning to Be: Development of practices and methodologies for assessing social, emotional, and health skills within education systems

The school, as an educational system, is more and more asked to teach to students the social and emotional skills that may facilitate their social success and well-being. Despite principals and teachers are aware of this new task, they are not provided with appropriate methods to assess the achievement of these non-cognitive skills. Indeed, traditionally students have been assessed at school only for their knowledge and academic performances. Therefore, the main purpose of the “Learning to Be” project is to test the efficacy of a Toolkit that would help teachers recognize and assess their own and pupils’ social, emotional, and health-related skills. In particular, the assessment concerns the five key competences of Social and Emotional Learning: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. The project involves seven European Countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The first phase of the project has consisted in the development of the Toolkit, that is a set of assessment tools and methods that teachers will be trained to integrate into their educational practices. In the second phase, the Toolkit will be implemented during the school year 2018-2019 in selected schools in Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Italy, and Spain. Participants will be primary school and lower secondary school teachers and students who will attend 4th and 8th grades next school year. The efficacy of the Toolkit will be evaluated using a research design characterized by pre-test, training and intervention, and post-test.