Improving socio-emotional competencies in pre-school pupils through emotional education.

Abstract

Working with pupils on appropriate social-emotional education in schools will bring numerous benefits for human beings and for the society of the future (Monjas and González, 2000). The objective of this research is to verify to what extent the students who participate in the programme significantly improve their emotional and social competence. The method used was a quasi-experimental pre-test/post- est design with a non-equivalent control group. Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS software (version 25.0) and the EXCEL spreadsheet (Microsoft Office 2019) and the non-parametric Wilcoxon and Mann Whitney test was used to see if there were statistically significant differences between the different groups. A total of 173 5-year-old pupils participated in the study, of which 89 were from the experimental group and 84 from the control group, all of them from Murcia (Spain). The experimental group was enrolled in the Annual Emotional Intelligence Programme (EMOTI1) (Hurtado and Salas, 2019), and the measuring instrument used was the questionnaire for students on social competence (Caruana and Tercero, 2011). The results showed that the children who participated in the study were less aggressive and showed greater social and communicative competence. After the programme, the pupils in the experimental group interact with each other in a more sociable way and better express their emotions; they develop less violent behaviour and better know how to resolve conflict situations, which has a very positive impact on their emotional and social development.