Social-Emotional Learning Competencies and Its Relation to Reasoning Skills: Moderating Effect of Academic Strand

Abstract

Waning attention to the facets of social and emotional learning competencies (SELC) in an educational context along with the students’ poor mathematical performance, which can be predicted through mathematical reasoning skills (MRS), is an issue that has to be addressed in the Philippines. Despite the fact that it has been shown to have an impact on mathematics achievement, associating SELC into the field of mathematical reasoning has yet to be explored. Hence, the study attempted to shed attention on the relationship between the perceived SELC of the respondents in terms of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making and their level of MRS as to analyzing, generalizing, and justifying, and if strand moderates this relationship. A descriptive-correlational design with moderation analysis was used and stratified-random sampling technique was utilized in choosing 117 grade 12 students from one state university. Adapted self-report survey and mathematical reasoning tasks were used to gather data. The results revealed that there is a significant relationship between the perceived SELC and MRS, except in self-management and relationship skills. Findings have also suggested that strand moderates the relationship of the two variables which implies that the interaction of SELC and strands of the respondents poses a direct relationship with their reasoning abilities in mathematics, when students are from STEM. Implementation of teaching strategies fostering students’ social and emotional states is recommended.