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.
10 April 2023 in Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala
Research shows that emotions and emotion regulation strategies are important variables for family functioning. The aim of the present article was to review the literature on the role of emotions and emotion regulation in couple relationships and parent-child interaction. The paper presents the most important theoretical models on emotions and family functioning and provides an overview of research investigating the association of positive emotions, negative emotions and emotion regulation with family relationships outcomes. First, we provided an overview on the functionality and social function of positive and negative emotions. Second, we investigated the role of positive and negative emotions in couple relationship and parent-child interaction. Third, we emphasized the role of specific intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in couple relationships. Finally, we outlined the role of parents in child’s emotional development. The conclusions of our review support the importance of including emotions and emotion regulation strategies in counselling programs for couples and families.
Starting from the basic idea that identifying predictive family factors for children’s well-being is among the levels of the psychology of sustainable human development, our study aimed to investigate the impact of mothers’ achievement goal orientations and parental self-efficacy on their children’s academic well-being, considering children’s own achievement goals as a mediator variable. The entire sample comprised 350 participants: 175 children (42.86% boys) and their respective mothers. Children were enrolled in the 4th grade (n = 85; Mage = 10.44, SD = 0.49), in the 8th grade (n = 62; Mage = 14.45, SD = 0.53), and in the 12th grade (n = 28; Mage = 18.39, SD = 0.62). The results indicated that mothers’ motivational orientations had a strong effect on their children’s corresponding motivational orientations. Mothers’ achievement goal orientations and parental self-efficacy had significant effects on children’s well-being, mediated by children’s goal orientations. Children’s well-being was positively predicted by mothers’ mastery and performance-approach goal orientations, with variations between age groups. The importance of the parental motivational orientations in the development of the children’s corresponding orientations and well-being suggests that changing academic adaptation might be possible by operating early interventions at the parents’ level. Further research is necessary to explore why performance-approach goals had a positive impact on well-being in this cultural context, as previous studies revealed that this type of goal orientation may be detrimental to well-being.
1 April 2021 in Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala
We address in this work the relationship between the perceived demands of the teaching profession as they are conceptualized by job demands-resources model and the teachers coping strategies activated in on-site and online teaching. The participants (N=127) were a convenience sample of Romanian teachers. Specifically, we found that the teaching demands are perceived as being more challenging in online environment when teaching involves interacting with talented children, with children with behavioural problems or with abandoned children. Teachers from rural areas perceive the online teaching of talented children more demanding compared to teachers from urban areas and there are correlations between the teachers' seniority and the teaching demands. The obtained results also showed that some teaching demands in online situation correlate significantly with certain coping strategies (e.g. the positive reappraisal coping strategy is activated by teachers who perceive the different levels of children's development as being challenging in online situation, and the acceptance strategy is used by teachers who resent an increase in teaching workload due to children who disturb the activity in the classroom). These findings are discussed in order to develop strategies to enhance the quality of teaching practices.
1 April 2021 in Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala
Countless studies have shown that there is a connection between anxiety felt during exams and school performance. We as individuals are exposed to failure in the moment of an exam and for those who are not familiar with the context, the opportunity to fail is more probable to happen. The goals of this study are: to identify the relation between exam anxiety and scholar resilience based on gender of the subject and the class he is a part of. The sample of the study was formed of 96 students from IV grade. There are 57 boys and 38 girls with ages between 9 and 11. The students are from primary school number 8 and primary school number 4 from Suceava, Romania. With the mention that for all the students, we have the parents acceptance that stands for their children's to be a part of the research with the mention of their children's information to remain confidential. Research tools used for the study are: the scale to test exams anxiety-scale made by Douglas & Benson and the questionnaire of resilience-(Oshio et al., 2003/2015). The research showed that there is a connection between exams anxiety and resilience based on gender of subject and that the level of resilience is different for all of the 4 classes that took part in the study, the biggest value belonging to the first class. The future directions for the study could be about the influence of the teachers on the level of anxiety during exams and their influence on developing resilience in students.
10 April 2023 in Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala
This paper intends to determine the extent to which well-being, resilience, emotional intelligence and experiencing difficult situations interact with each other in the school population and whether experiencing each one of the thirteen difficult situations analyzed (e.g., death of a parent, divorce of parents, domestic violence, violence by colleagues) causes significant differences in terms of resilience and well-being between children who had been exposed to it and children who had not. The present study was quantitative research that included a sample of 845 children from primary to high school (55 % girls and 45% boys) aged between 8 and 18 years (M=13.5). Results of correlation analysis show that there is a positive relationship between emotional intelligence, well-being and resilience, and a negative correlation between experiencing difficult situations, students' well-being, and the level of resilience they reported. Furthermore, the T-test was used to do a hierarchy of difficult situations depending on the effect that their experience has on well-being and resilience. In terms of well-being, this was most influenced by family violence, violence from colleagues and parental divorce. On the other hand, for resilience, the effect was strongest in the case of family violence, followed by famine and violence from colleagues.