Emotional Competency in Education

It is claimed that emotional competency is crucial to children’s scholastic success, and for creating healthy academic environments. The implementation of interventions to help children build emotional competency are, thus, important. But, how do we ensure that the interventions we design and deliver promote individual change? Following the principles laid out by Kelly (2012), in the current paper we provide a scientific focus for the implementation of emotional competency interventions in education contexts. In the paper we, first, examine the evidence for the thesis that emotional competency impacts academic success and other related constructs. We also consider how emotional competency can be conceptualised, and advocate the use of a multi-methods approach when measuring an individual’s emotional competency so that different aspects of the construct are examined. We end by describing some interventions that have been designed to increase emotional competency among both students and educators. Those interventions are representative of the ideals among educators to help children develop emotional competency, but we highlight the need for (1) further rigorous scientific evaluation, including the use of further Randomized Control Trials, and (2) effective implementation. The main message is that existing evidence supports claims emotional competency impacts academic life, but there is a need to consider how we measure that construct to ensure appropriate evaluation of intervention strategies and the monitoring of individual progress. The application of robust scientific methods to the implementation and evaluation of programmes for the training of emotional competency is imperative.