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.

Conscientiousness in weight loss maintainers and regainers.

OBJECTIVE: The role of personality in weight loss maintenance (WLM) is poorly understood. Although the personality trait of conscientiousness has been associated with health-promoting behaviors in general, no study has specifically evaluated the importance of conscientiousness for WLM. This study compared conscientiousness (both in aggregate and on the facet level) and control over healthy lifestyle behaviors (e.g., food quantity and temptations, consistent meal and sleep timing, exercise adherence, and psychosocial health and stress coping) in successful weight loss maintainers and regainers. METHOD: The sample included 869 National Weight Control Registry participants who reported maintaining ≥ 30-lb weight loss for ≥ 1 year (maintainers) and 484 participants from Amazon's MTurk crowdsourcing marketplace who reported trying but failing to maintain weight loss for 1 year (regainers). Both groups self-reported the Cherynshenko Conscientiousness Scale, the Healthy Lifestyle & Personal Control Questionnaire, body mass index, and demographics in an online survey. RESULTS: Maintainers reported higher levels of total conscientiousness (p = .005), order, virtue, responsibility, and industriousness (ps ≤ .05), but not self-control, compared with regainers after controlling for basic demographic differences. Unexpectedly, regainers scored significantly higher on the facet of traditionalism (p < .001). Maintainers also reported greater degree of control over food quantity and temptations, consistent meal and sleep timing, and exercise adherence (ps < .001), but not psychosocial health and stress coping, compared to with regainers. CONCLUSIONS: Successful weight loss maintainers reported small-to-moderately higher levels of conscientiousness compared with regainers. Evaluating whether conscientiousness can be incorporated into WLM treatment is warranted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Situational Judgment Tests as a method for measuring personality: Development and validity evidence for a test of Dependability.

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) are criterion valid low fidelity measures that have gained much popularity as predictors of job performance. A broad variety of SJTs have been studied, but SJTs measuring personality are still rare. Personality traits such as Conscientiousness are valid predictors of many educational, work and life-related outcomes and SJTs are less prone to faking than classical self-report measurements. We developed an SJT measure of Dependability, a core facet of Conscientiousness, by gathering critical incidents in semi-structured interviews using the construct definition of Dependability as a prompt. We examined the psychometric properties of the newly developed SJTs across two studies (N = 546 general population; N = 440 sales professionals). The internal validity of the SJTs was examined by correlating the SJT scores with related self-report measures of Dependability and Conscientiousness, as well as testing the unidimensionality of the measure with CFA. Additionally, we specified a bi-factor model of SJT, self-report and behavioral checklist measures of Dependability accounting for common and specific measurement variance. External validity was examined by correlating the SJT scale and specific factor with work-related outcomes. The results show that the Dependability SJTs with an expert based scoring procedure were psychometrically sound and correlated moderately to highly with traditional self-report measures of Dependability and Conscientiousness. However, a large proportion of SJT variance cannot be accounted for by personality alone. This supports the notion that SJTs measure general domain knowledge about the effectiveness of personality-related behaviors. We conclude that SJT measures of personality can be a promising addition to classical self-report assessments and can be used in a wide variety of applications beyond measurement and selection, for instance as formative assessments of personality.

Emotional Intelligence Relates to Well-Being: Evidence from the Situational Judgment Test of Emotional Management.

BACKGROUND: This research was conducted to examine whether people high in emotional intelligence (EI) have greater well-being than people low in EI. METHOD: The Situational Test of Emotion Management, Scales of Psychological Well-being, and Day Reconstruction Method were completed by 131 college students. RESULTS: Responses to the Situational Test of Emotion Management were strongly related to eudaimonic well-being as measured by responses on the Scales of Psychological Well-being (r=.54). Furthermore, the ability to manage emotions was related to hedonic well-being, correlating with both the frequency of experienced positive affect and the frequency of experienced negative affect, as measured by the Day Reconstruction Method. CONCLUSION: Two aspects of these results suggest a relationship between EI and well-being. First, the observed relationship between ability EI and psychological well-being is the largest reported in the literature to date. Second, this study is the first use of the Day Reconstruction Method to examine the relationship between well-being and EI. Results are discussed in terms of the potential for training emotion management to enhance well-being. Methodological advances for future research are also suggested.

Long ago it was meant to be: the interplay between time, construal, and fate beliefs.

Fate means that an event was meant to be, that is, predetermined by prior unseen forces. Most people believe in fate, which seems at odds with similarly pervasive beliefs that alternative past actions would have brought about different circumstances (i.e., counterfactual beliefs). Two experiments revealed that construal level accounts for the relative plausibility of fate versus counterfactual explanations. Construal was manipulated in Experiment 1, such that goal pursuits framed in abstract ("why?") as opposed to concrete ("how?") terms heightened fate but not counterfactual attributions. Extending this finding, Experiment 2 showed that fate judgments were higher for temporally distant than recent past events, an effect mediated by construal perceptions. Neither counterfactual nor luck judgments varied with temporal distance. These findings help to explain how individuals explain complicated yet meaningful life events while extending the reach of Trope and Liberman's (2003) construal-level theory.