Abstract: Emotional competence (EC) is important for children’s social adjustment and sustainable development. The present study designed a school based emotional competence learning (ECL) program and examined its effectiveness with 56 Chinese preschoolers aged 5–6. A quasiexperimental design was employed to examine the impact of the ECL program on young children’s EC. Two upper Kindergarten classes (Daban) for children aged 5–6 were randomly assigned as experimental group (n = 31, 42% girls, Mage = 68.31 months, SD = 3.75) and control group (n = 25, 44% girls, Mage = 68.16 months, SD = 3.77). The experimental group was engaged in a 15-week ECL program, whereas the control group had similar duration courses without emotional competence training. All the children were administered the Test of Emotion Comprehension, Expression Identifification Task, and Emotion Regulation Strategy Inventory before and after the intervention. The results indicated no signifificant differences between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test. In contrast, the experimental group outperformed the control group in most EC components in the post-test. Meanwhile, the experimental group demonstrated greater increases in EC components. The fifindings suggest that this ECL program has strong potential as a school-based, structured program for enhancing children’s emotional competence. The educational implications of these fifindings are discussed.
Keywords: emotional development; school intervention; emotional competence learning; preschooler; quasi-experim
Published journal: Sustainability （SSCI） First Published 3 June 2021
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