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This paper is aimed at providing further psychometric robustness to the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), a standardized tool for assessing emotion comprehension in childhood. The study explores the factorial structure, gender and age invariance in a large sample of children from Northern and Central Italy (N = 1,478, M = 755; F = 723) aged 3 to 10 years, identifying the pattern of agenormative development across six-month intervals. The confirmatory factorial analysis supports the original psychometric structure of the TEC. Implications for typical and atypical assessment and for research purpose are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) has been used extensively to investigate children's understanding of emotion. The present study aimed at investigating the TEC's factorial structure, its measurement invariance across age and gender, and defining age-referred TEC scores, in a large sample of 1,478 children (755 males, 723 females) aged between 3 and 10 years. Confirmatory factor analysis of the data yielded support for the original psychometric structure of the TEC, which is based on three developmental domains of emotion understanding: external, mental, and reflective. Measurement equivalence was supported across age and gender groups. We also obtained normative data for interpreting TEC outcomes and defined the corresponding normative pattern of development across six-month age intervals. Overall, our findings suggest that the TEC is a robust instrument for investigating emotion understanding in children aged 3 to 10 years. The limitations of the study and the potential use of the TEC are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, there has been a substantial increase in post-secondary education participation in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Union countries. This increase, however, does not necessarily reflect a parallel equitable growth in post-secondary education, and early school leaving is still an issue of concern in particular regions and countries across the world. This paper presents a study on increasing participation in post-secondary education in Malta, the country with the one of the highest proportions of early school leaving in the European Union. The study was carried out in a region with one of the highest rates of early school leaving in the country, making use of a phenomenological approach as well as a resilient systems perspective to early school leaving. On the basis of students' narratives, the study identifies a number of risk and protective factors in early school leaving and makes various suggestions on how to build more resilient systems to facilitate access to post-secondary education, particularly for students coming from low socio-economic, excluded backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the findings and implications of a semi-randomised control trial study on the effectiveness of circle time (CT) on primary school students’ social and emotional learning, as well as classroom teachers’ and students’ experience of CT. A social and emotional learning programme was delivered through CT by trained classroom teachers across the years in one primary school, with other classrooms serving as control groups. The classroom teachers completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) at pre- and post-intervention, while the CT teachers also completed a questionnaire on their experience of implementing CT in the classroom. The CT students also completed a questionnaire on their own experience of CT. The SDQ scores suggest that CT students showed less internalised difficulties when compared to their control peers, while the qualitative data from both teachers and students suggest that the CT students also exhibited less behaviour problems and more prosocial behaviour. The study identifies various strengths and weaknesses of the programme and makes recommendations on how it could be organised more effectively in the classroom. The paper concludes that rather than taking CT as the default option for nurturing such values as student empowerment, inclusion and equity, there is a need for further rigorous studies on the impact of CT not only on students’ social and emotional learning and behaviour but also on the classroom relationships and climate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

RESCUR Surfing the Waves is a recently developed resilience curriculum for early years and primary schools in Europe. It seeks to develop in marginalized young learners the requisite competences needed to overcome the various challenges in their lives to achieve academic success and social and emotional wellbeing. The competences include developing a growth mindset, making use of one’s strengths, self-determination, effective communication skills and healthy relationships, and overcoming challenges and obstacles. This paper presents the findings of a study on the implementation of the programme in five kindergarten centres in Malta over a 1-year period. A pre- and post-intervention study in 20 classrooms (97 children) showed an improvement in resilience skills, prosocial behavior and learning engagement, but not in internalized and externalized problem behaviors. A small scale study in two nurture classes at two of the schools found similar findings. The findings suggest that there are indications that the programme as a proportionate universal intervention for early years leads to an improvement in social and academic behaviours, but more rigorous research is needed to substantiate these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research explored the factor structure and the reliability of the Italian version of the Emotion Regulation Checklist [ERC; Shields, A.,& Cicchetti, D. (1997). Emotion regulation among school-age children: The development and validation of a new criterion Q-sort scale. Developmental Psychology, 33, 906-916], an instrument that has been widely adopted in studies using parents and/or teachers as informants. We carried out two studies evaluating the properties of the Italian ERC (ERC-I) when completed by parents and teachers, respectively. Study 1 participants were kindergarten and elementary school children for whom the ERC was completed by their mothers. Study 2 involved kindergarten and elementary school children for whom the ERC was completed by their teachers. The work confirms the two-factor structure of the instrument, supporting structure validity and the reliability of ERC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]