International Journal of Emotional Education

3 - 36

Authors: Paul Downes

OECD reports emphasise ten key steps to equity in education, with concrete targets related to low attainment and early school leaving. Such steps, however, neglect the importance of emotional dimensions to early school leaving and the consequent need for system level emotional supports. The current study involves qualitative research interviews with senior government officials and secondary school management representatives across eight European countries, with a particular focus on school climate and emotional support issues. Issues raised by interviewees for students at risk of early school leaving include supports for withdrawn children, for those at risk of suicide and those being bullied at school affecting their nonattendance. Other emerging themes include alternatives to suspension and teacher education for improving their conflict resolution skills. Some interviewees explicitly observe the dearth of emotional support services available in practice in their countries. The pervasive policy gaps across national levels for a mental health and emotional support strategy, as part of an early school leaving prevention strategy, requires serious and immediate attention.

50 - 56

Authors: Helen Cowie

Despite more than two decades of anti-bullying initiatives in schools, children and young people regularly mention relationships within the peer group as the major factor that causes them to feel unsafe at school. The situation is complicated by the fact that these interpersonal safety issues are actually generated by the peer group and often in contexts that are difficult for adults to control. The recent upsurge of cyberbullying is a case in point. Teachers and parents often feel powerless to intervene in the private world that children and young people create for themselves. This article explores the strategies that are commonly recommended for dealing with cyberbullying and examines what research tells us about their effectiveness. The conclusion is that, whatever the value of technological tools for tackling cyberbullying, we cannot avoid the fact that this is also an interpersonal problem. The implication for practice is that we already know many approaches for preventing and reducing cyberbullying and should build on this knowledge rather than treating the issue as something completely new.

4 - 19

Authors: Carmel Cefai , Liberato Camilleri, Paul Cooper and Lara Said

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) (Goodman, 1997) is one of the most commonly used measures of mental health in children and young people and has been translated into more than forty languages. This paper discusses the translation of the SDQ in Maltese and explores the structure and use of the teacher and parent Maltese translations. 4797 school teachers and 2865 parents completed the Maltese teacher and parent SDQ respectively. The results indicate that the Maltese SDQ, particularly the teacher version, meets the basic psychometric properties which make it a useful index of social, emotional and behaviour difficulties and prosocial behaviour amongst Maltese children and young people. Exploratory factor analysis suggests that the Maltese version clearly discriminates between difficulty and prosocial behaviour, and that it may be closer in fit to a three factor model, namely internalized difficulties, externalized difficulties and prosocial behaviour. While there are a number of variations, which may be explained by the local educational and socio-cultural context, Maltese mean scores are quite comparable with international SDQ norms. In view of a number of limitations, however, the use of the Maltese SDQ needs to be used with caution and further research into its psychometric properties is suggested.

30 - 47

Authors: Chi-Ming Kam, Lance Wai-lap Wong, Kennis Mei-sze Fung

This paper describes a pilot study of a reduced version of the PATHS Curriculum, a Usdeveloped evidence-based SEL program, among schools in Hong Kong SAR (China). Three hundred and sixteen 12th grade students in three elementary schools participated in the study. A limited number of first grade PATHS lessons were adapted and translated into Chinese. Twelve teachers learned and adopted these lessons in their teaching. Students in these classrooms learned about different emotions and practiced self-control. The intervention lasted four months. After the intervention, students showed improvement in emotion understanding, emotion regulation and prosocial behavior. No change was observed in the level of children's problem behaviors. Over 65% of the teachers reported a high degree of satisfaction and willingness to adopt the intervention. The effects of the intervention varied among schools, with variations in the level of intervention and principal support, but not in the quality of implementation. Discussion is focused on the factors that could shape the adoption and implementation of SEL programs, especially the role of the difference in school systems between Hong Kong and the United States.

70 - 81

Authors: Damian Spiteri and Katya DeGiovanni

This study analyzed how a cohort of eight young women who underwent certain difficulties whilst at secondary school experienced their transition from secondary school to either work or further education. It explores changes in their perception of events and happenings that they classified as significant to them, and the influence that these changes of perception had on their evolving life-course. While not formally classified as emotionally or behaviorally challenged, all the participants in this study claimed to have had varying depths of difficulty when at secondary school, some alleging that they had been classified as troublesome by their teachers and others claiming to have seen themselves as disruptive in classroom settings. The study was informed by the participants' voices about how they saw their transitions being forged and has a phenomenological focus.