Abstract
There is growing evidence in the literature of positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school performance. Several hypotheses have been used to explain how these variables may be related to school performance. In this paper, we explored the role of various school adjustment variables in the relationship between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades, using a weighted network approach. This network approach allowed us to analyze the structure of interrelations between each variable, pointing to both central and mediatory school and socio-emotional variables within the network. Self-reported data from around 3,400 French vocational high school students were examined. This data included a set of interpersonal socio-emotional competencies (cognitive and affective empathy, socio-emotional behaviors and collective orientation), school adjustment measures (adaptation to the institution, school anxiety, self-regulation at school, and self-perceived competence at school) as well as grades in mathematics and French language. The results showed that self-regulation at school weighted the most strongly on the whole network, and was the most important mediatory pathway. More specifically, self-regulation mediated the relationships between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades.
Highlights
Grades in mathematics and French language show no direct relationships with socioemotional competencies, but indirect connections through selfregulation
Self-regulation displays the highest strength centrality, suggesting that this variable is an important mediatory variable, but it weighs heavily on other network variables. It shows direct connections with all socioemotional competencies and with grades in French language, adaptation to institution and self-perceived competence at school. It only shows an indirect connection with grades in math and school anxiety
Other studies have shown that test anxiety is more strongly related to self-perceived competence at school than to actual school performance (Meece et al, 1990). Consistent with these findings, our results suggest that emotionally vulnerable adolescents have a lower self-perception of their academic competence and/or that a low perception of academic competence generates school anxiety, and that selfperception of competence mediates the relationships between anxiety and grades
Summary
Interest in socio-emotional competencies in education has grown considerably over the last few decades (Oberle et al, 2016) and there is a large amount of research showing their positive and adaptive role at school (Durlak et al, 2011; Domitrovich et al, 2017).A number of studies have shown that better socio-emotional competencies are associated with better school grades (Durlak et al, 2011; Taylor et al, 2017; MacCann et al, 2020).Several hypotheses attempting to explain the positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school achievement have been suggested in the literature, but this issue is not clearly understood. A number of studies have shown that better socio-emotional competencies are associated with better school grades (Durlak et al, 2011; Taylor et al, 2017; MacCann et al, 2020). We explored the role of several variables of school adjustment in the relationships between socio-emotional competencies and grades in French vocational high school students, using a weighted network approach. This approach is interesting as it allowed us to visualize the structure and strength of interrelations between variables, and to identify direct and indirect mediatory pathways (Epskamp et al, 2012, 2018)
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