The challenges of today’s society demand high levels of socio-emotional skills in children and adolescents; therefore, mental health is an important issue to be addressed and promoted in schools. The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a school mental health program (Promoting Mental Health at Schools; PROMEHS) designed to promote socio-emotional learning and prevent psychosocial difficulties in children and adolescents. The study was conducted on a sample of 1392 students (evaluated by 104 teachers) from kindergarten (n = 446), primary school (n = 426), secondary school (n = 354), and high school (n = 166). A quasi-experimental study design with experimental and waitlist control groups was used to evaluate the program’s effectiveness. Students were non-randomly assigned to the experimental (n = 895) and control group (n = 497). Students belonging to the experimental group received one-hour lessons once a week for 12 weeks. The teachers evaluated their students’ social-emotional skills, strengths, and difficulties before and after the intervention. The results indicated the effectiveness of the PROMEHS program in improving social-emotional skills for all school levels, reducing internalizing problems in primary and secondary school chil-dren, and reducing externalizing issues for kindergarten and primary school children. The PROMEHS program is a promising approach to enhancing childrens’ and adolescents’ social and emotional skills and to decreasing psychosocial difficulties, such as internalizing and externalizing problems.

(1) Background: The high rates of mental disorders in adolescence presented in the literature often exclude internalizing problems. Although there is extensive data on the effectiveness of SEL skills in improving resilience, few studies included evidence in their reports on the relationship between SEL skills and internalizing problems. The present study aims to deepen the understanding of the relationship between SEL, resilience, and internalizing problems, by investigating the mediating effect of resilience between SEL components and internalizing problems. (2) Methods: Adolescents (N = 968 adolescents, aged between 11 and 18 years old; M = 13.30; SD = 1.92) from 30 schools from the NE region of Romania were invited to fill out questionnaires on social and emotional learning, internalizing problems, and resilience. (3) Results: The results show that resilience mediates the link between self-awareness and internalizing problems, between self-management and internalizing problems, between relationship skills and internalizing problems, and between responsible decision-making and internalizing problems. (4) Conclusions: These findings revealed the need for social and emotional learning interventions that include resilience-oriented approaches in order to decrease internalizing problems in adolescents. Moreover, we suggest that more culturally appropriate interventions are required to better investigate the interaction between SEL components, resilience, and internalizing problems.

The application of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) methodologies within classrooms has been widely adopted and examined, highlighting its positive impact on the academic, emotional, and social sectors at both the individual and classroom levels. Through this wide applicability, a need is identified to focus more on the development of SEL approaches that support the integration of the various parts of a SEL methodology (e.g., planning, implementation, monitoring, and assessment). Such approaches should not underestimate the value of the SEL assessment. It is necessary to engage both the developers and practitioners of SEL methodologies and provide tools to assist teachers to better interpret the collected data and results and plan targeted SEL activities. Motivated by such needs, we detail the EduCardia SEL methodology that focuses on the provision of a set of guidelines and tools to assess and improve the social and emotional competencies of students in primary and secondary educational levels, by taking advantage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The EduCardia SEL methodology considers the integration of the various parts of a SEL methodological approach and supports continuous assessment processes, while offering user-friendly interfaces to interpret the produced results. Evaluation results are provided based on the application of the EduCardia SEL methodology in a large set of K12 schools across Greece for a short-term period, considering three different age groups. It is shown that the targeted competencies are improved, while insights are provided by teachers for the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach.