| At the end of the 20th century,the implementation of social emotional learning,which aims at promoting students’ social and emotional competence,has effectively helped American schools deal with the situation where students have many problematic behaviors and poor academic performance,thus social and emotional competence has been widely concerned by education researchers around the world.Social and emotional competence is the ability to understand,manage,and express the social and emotional aspects of one’s life in ways that enable the successful management of life tasks such as learning,forming relationships,solving everyday problems,and adapting to the complex demands of growth and development.It includes self-awareness,social awareness,self-management,relationship-management and responsible decision making.Numerous empirical studies have proved that social and emotional competence is significantly positively correlated with students’ academic performance,nevertheless the mechanism of how it works has not been clarified.Making the specific mechanism clear is helpful for education practitioners to design and implement effective intervention measures,promote the development of students’ social and emotional competence,improve students’ academic performance,and help students to get lifelong achievement.On the basis of previous studies,this study has a reasonable hypothesis: social and emotional competence affects academic performance indirectly through academic selfefficacy and teacher-student relationship.The author examines such hypothesis by quantitative research method.The empirical evidence of this study attempts to clarify the specific path of how social and emotional competence affects students’ academic performance,as well as serve as an empirical basis for schools to improve their teaching practice.The measuring tools of this study include: the Social and Emotional Competence Scale(Chinese version)translated by SSIS-SEL,the Academic Selfefficacy Scale(Chinese version)compiled by Yusong Liang based on MSLQ,and the Teacher-student Relationship Scale(Chinese version)revised by Zhiyong Qu based on STRS.This study involves 890 pupils from two primary schools in a provincial city in southwest China,ranging from grade 4 to grade 6.The results of this study show that: 1.Social and emotional competence can significantly predicts students’ academic achievement;2.In the path of social and emotional competence affecting students’ academic achievement,Academic selfefficacy acts as complete mediating factor and the mediating effect accounts for88.2%;3.In the path of social and emotional competence affecting students’ academic achievement,Teacher-student relationship acts as partial mediating factor and the mediating effect accounts for 16.9%.According to the results above,the author suggests as follow: Firstly,Chinese education practitioners should pay attention to and measure students’ social and emotional competence,especially caring the students who belong to the weaker group;Secondly,educators need to improve students’ academic selfefficacy,so that social emotional competence can have its positive effect on students development;Thirdly,while designing native social emotional learning curricula,educators may learn from the successful experiences of western countries,collect enough empirical data,and make the cooperation between school,family and community possible. |
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