Social-emotional context and academic competence: The mediating effect of self-efficacy.

摘要

Within the school setting, it’s critical to understand the social and emotional constructs that may affect youth and their ability to achieve academically. During the adolescent developmental phase, youth experience periods of exploration wherein they actively examine values, beliefs, and goals, and experiment with different social roles, plans, and ideologies. From the interaction between the social climate and an individual’s character values, such as meaning in life, personal virtues and hope, a social-emotional context construct can be posited. Social-emotional context can be understood as the level of an individual’s core identity beliefs in combination with their perceived social environment. The sample analyzed was included 369 participants, 183 Jewish and 186 Arab students. To the first hypothesis, that the disparate elements of school climate, personal virtues, meaning in life and hope would effectively combine into a single construct of social-emotional context the evidence from this study is supportive. A suitably high Cronbach’s alpha was found (α=.88) and this alpha held to acceptable levels across the two distinct subsamples of Jewish and Arab students (α =.78 and .87 respectively).;However, the second hypothesis of this study, that the external validation of the social-emotional context construct can be evaluated via a mediation analysis with academic competence and self-efficacy, was not supported. Although social-emotional context had a significant relationship with self-efficacy (r=.56, p<.001) and that this significance held across both the Jewish and Arab subsamples (r=.56 and .52 respectively, p<.001 for both), hierarchical regression found that social-emotional context is not mediated by self-efficacy in either subsamples.;This study found that perceptions of school climate, personal virtue, meaning in life and hope can be combined into a valid construct: social-emotional context. And, though the potential to impact academic competence is theoretically supported, further research is needed to evaluate whether this external validation is more than theoretically sound. Cultural issues in this study relating to both the measures and the ratings suggest that this evaluation may best be done in a more homogeneous population linked more closely to the normative samples of the instruments used to more accurately see the potential activation of theory in practice.