Examining SEB skills' incremental validity over personality traits in predicting academic achievement.

Personality traits and social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills share the same behavioral referents, but whereas traits refer to a person's typical or average performance, skills refer to their capacity or maximal performance. Given their shared behavioral foundations, an important question to address is whether personality traits and SEB skills independently predict important outcomes. In this study (N = 642), we examined whether subscales of the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI), a measure of SEB skills, provided incremental validity in the prediction of the ACT composite score, an important academic outcome for American adolescents, over the Big Five personality traits. Consistent with our expectations, on average, SEB skills showed stronger associations with ACT achievement scores than personality traits. Moreover, SEB skills added incremental validity over and above personality traits in predicting ACT achievement scores. The findings reinforce the importance of conceptually distinguishing and measuring traits and skills.

Social and Emotional Skills Predict Postsecondary Enrollment and Retention.

INTRODUCTION: Social and emotional (SE) skills are known to be linked to important life outcomes, many of which fall into the academic domain. For example, meta-analytic data show that the skill of Sustaining Effort is nearly or just as important for academic performance as intelligence. In a recent study with long-term tracking of high school students, those who came from schools with a strong emphasis on SE skill development were more likely to enroll in college within two years of high school graduation. Longitudinal studies like this one are rare, however. METHOD: The focus of the present study is on the SE skills of 6662 students assessed during high school and their relationship with high school academic performance, standardized college admissions test performance, and ultimately postsecondary enrollment and retention. RESULTS: We examined mean-level differences in household income, high school GPA, ACT Composite scores, and SE skills by college enrollment and retention status and found several significant differences, often favoring the enrolled or retained group. Moreover, we found support for the incremental validity of SE skills as they predicted enrollment and retention above household income, high school GPA, and ACT scores. DISCUSSION: Understanding SE skills' effects on later academic outcomes is important to help inform early SE skill intervention and development efforts in secondary and postsecondary settings. Additional implications and future directions are discussed.

Multimethod Support for Using the Big Five Framework to Organize Social and Emotional Skills.

A challenge in the field of social and emotional learning is the lack of consensus regarding a framework to delineate key social and emotional skills (SE skills). Taking a conceptual approach, some have argued that the Big Five model from personality psychology offers a comprehensive framework to organize SE skills; however, little research has been done to empirically support this. In two studies-one using a factor analytic, data-driven approach, and one using an expert consensus approach-we provide multimethod evidence suggesting that there is a significant degree of overlap between SE skills and the Big Five, and we conclude that the Big Five can be used to organize SE skills.

A Big Five-Based Multimethod Social and Emotional Skills Assessment: The Mosaic™ by ACT® Social Emotional Learning Assessment.

A focus on implementing social and emotional (SE) learning into curricula continues to gain popularity in K-12 educational contexts at the policy and practitioner levels. As it continues to be elevated in educational discourse, it becomes increasingly clear that it is important to have reliable, validated measures of students' SE skills. Here we argue that framework and design are additional important considerations for the development and selection of SE skill assessments. We report the reliability and validity evidence for The Mosaic™ by ACT® Social Emotional Learning Assessment, an assessment designed to measure SE skills in middle and high school students that makes use of a research-based framework (the Big Five) and a multi-method approach (three item types including Likert, forced choice, and situational judgment tests). Here, we provide the results from data collected from more than 33,000 students who completed the assessment and for whom we have data on various outcome measures. We examined the validity evidence for the individual item types and the aggregate scores based on those three. Our findings support the contribution of multi-method assessment and an aggregate score. We discuss the ways the field can benefit from this or similarly designed assessments and discuss how the assessment results can be used by practitioners to promote programs aimed at stimulating students' personal growth.

Adjectives vs. Statements in Forced Choice and Likert Item Types: Which Is More Resistant to Impression Management in Personality Assessment?

Our objective was to compare individuals' ability to intentionally make a positive impression when responding to a Five-Factor Model personality measure under adjective vs. statement and forced choice vs. Likert conditions. Participants were 1,798 high school students who were randomly assigned to either a condition receiving normal instructions or instructions to make a positive impression. We compared the groups' scores and validity estimates under the various conditions. Although impression management occurred on all item types, participants could more easily manipulate their responses to Likert items vs. forced choice items, and statements vs. adjectives. Item type made little difference in terms of convergent and discriminant validity and criterion-related validity for all outcomes but one, ACT scores, which suggests cognitive ability plays a role in impression management ability.