Last week, The Brookings Institute released a paper on the importance of focusing on social and emotional development to ensure children’s academic success. In the paper, author Hugh Price, calls for a new educational paradigm that focuses on both the academic AND social development of struggling students noting, “Students who struggle perpetually in school often lack the social and emotional skills needed to succeed academically. They act out, interact poorly with teachers and classmates, pay scattered attention in class, and skip school.”
The hope, Price says, comes from focusing on children’s social and emotional development, pointing out that, “research and real-world experience convincingly show that interventions aimed at developing youngsters’ social and emotional skills boost their achievement levels and curtail behavioral problems.”
As you may recall, back in January, we released the results of Virginia’s Kindergarten Readiness Project which found that 34% of Virginia’s children arrive at kindergarten unprepared in one or more critical learning domain (literacy, math, self-regulation and social skills).
The report also revealed that children struggled more in self-regulation and social skills than in literacy and math:
- 20% of children face challenges with social skills
- 16% lack the self-regulation skills needed in the classroom environment
Decades of research demonstrate the ways in which children’s self-regulation and social skills are foundational to later school and life success. For instance, self-regulation has a greater influence on a student’s academic performance than his or her intelligence.
A child who enters kindergarten without basic skills in literacy, but who can pay attention in the classroom and persist through challenges, is more likely to respond to instruction than a child without these important self-regulation skills.
Here at E3, we are deeply committed to prioritizing the social and emotional development of Virginia’s children. Coming soon, we will have a series dedicated to helping you enhance the social and emotional development of the children in your lives. Stay tuned!
Want to read the full research paper from Brookings Institute? Click here.