Ricardo Primi
Universidade São Francisco; EduLab21, Ayrton Senna Institute, Brazil, & Lemann Center, Stanford University (visiting scholar fall 2020)
SENNA: EduLab Toolkit for the Assessment of Social and Emotional Skills for Children and Adolescents in Brazil
Whereas the structure of individual differences in personal, social, and emotional attributes is well understood in adults, much less work has been done in children and adolescents. On the assessment side, numerous instruments are in use for children, but they measure discordant attributes, ranging from one single factor (self-esteem; grit) to three factors (social, emotional, and academic self-efficacy) to five factors (strength and difficulties; Big Five traits). To construct a comprehensive measure for large-scale studies in Brazilian schools, Ayrton Senna Institute developed assessments mapping socio and emotional skills on the conceptual framework of the five-factor model of personality: SENNA (for students aged 10 to 19 years old), SENNA kids (for students aged 6 to 10 years old) and Socioemotional Dialogues for formative assessment. These instruments have been administered to more than 600,000 students at state-wide educational assessment systems in Brazil. I will present the general characteristics of these instruments and some recent data describing the social and emotional skills of children and adolescents in Brazil.
