The Development and Test of a Multidimensional, Equity-Oriented Scale of Teacher Social-Emotional Competence (T-SEC) in East Asian School Contexts

Background and Purpose: Promoting social-emotional competence (SEC) in adults who work with youth has been suggested as a key to addressing the Grand Challenge to Ensure Healthy Development for Youth (Kingston & Wilensky, 2018). As teachers interact with youth most directly and frequently within schools, there has been a growing interest in understanding and fostering teacher SEC (T-SEC). However, the literature lacks comprehensive, practical, and psychometrically sound measures of T-SEC. To fill this gap, we developed a multidimensional scale of T-SEC based on CASEL-5—a widely-adopted SEL framework, while including indicators explicitly focused on equity and inclusion. This study tested various psychometric properties of this scale with teacher samples from mainland China and South Korea, where there has been little research on T-SEC.

Methods: Based on literature reviews and feedback from field educators, we developed an initial pool of 37 self-report items covering all five areas of the CASEL framework, with some items measuring social awareness specifically related to ensuring equitable and inclusive school communities. In October 2023, we collected the first pilot data from a representative sample of elementary and middle school teachers within a county in southwestern China (n=606 across 40 schools; 55% women, average teaching years=17 [SD=10]). In April 2024, we also collected data from a self-selected, nationwide sample of elementary school teachers in Korea (n=245; 68% women, average teaching years=10 [SD=6]).

Results: With Chinese pilot data, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis best supported a bifactor model with 23 items, where each item was simultaneously loaded on both a global factor and one of the four specific factors: self-awareness, emotion management, social-awareness for equity and inclusion, and relationship skills. Interestingly, items related to decision-making were loaded onto the global factor, but not onto any specific factor. This 23-item bifactor structure also showed a good fit with Korean data, but in this sample, items for relationship skills (in addition to decision-making) were only loaded on the global factor.

In both samples, various dimensionality estimates suggest that most items were mainly indicative of the global factor rather than a specific factor. Across samples, this global factor showed high internal consistency (i.e., Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega over .90) and significant correlations with various teacher characteristics: job satisfaction (r=[.28, .34]), job burnout (r=[-.50, -.22]), mental health (r=[.23, .43]), belief in SEL (r=[.33, .47]), self-efficacy (r=[.55, 58]), and perceived school climate (r=[.43, .72]).

Conclusions and Implications: This study provides rigorous psychometric evidence of a new T-SEC scale that is comprehensive yet brief enough for practical use and also incorporates an equity lens. The findings suggest that T-SEC consists of multidimensional competencies, while some of them (e.g., related to decision-making) require more complex skills beyond one specific dimension, which altogether constitute a global factor. This scale can directly contribute to the emerging literature on T-SEC in East Asia, while also having the potential to be applied in diverse educational contexts around the world. We hope this study serves as a foundation for ongoing international efforts to promote T-SEC and school-based practices.