BRIEFLY NOTED
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Nº 14 - January 2012
Teaching Socio-Emotional Abilities
in Latin American Schools? The
Role of Non-Traditional Teachers
Mariana Alfonso
Marina Bassi
Christian Borja
can schools foster student's relevant socio-emotional abilities? The IDB, with the support
Summary: How
of distinguished local academic institutions, partnered with Enseña Chile, organization that
recruits outstanding and highly motivated young professionals to teach for two years in disadvantaged schools,
to study this question among others. This brief presents results suggesting that there is a positive association
between Enseña Chile professionals and socio-emotional abilities, and that these teachers transmit positive
attitudes to their students.
Teachers and Students‘
Socio - Emotional Abilities
The skills that the modern labor market and society demand
from youth are becoming increasingly complex. Evidence shows
that, in addition to solid cognitive skills, a set of “soft” socio emotional abilities are relevant to have a good career path and
achieve other important socioeconomic outcomes in life (Heckman,
Stixrud and Urzua, 2006; Urzua, 2008). In this context, identifying
education programs and experiences that have a noticeable impact
not only on cognitive skills, but also on relevant socio-emotional
skills is critical for a better design of educational reforms and
policies. Teachers clearly play an important role in teaching
these socio-emotional skills. Research has shown that a good
teacher can foster the relationship between students’ academic
performance and their socio-emotional abilities (Bandura 1977;
Rosenberg, 1965).
Enseña Chile: Attracting Top Universidy
Graduates into Teaching
Enseña Chile is the first adaptation of the Teach for America
model in Latin America, and seeks to attract human capital
of the highest quality in the most vulnerable urban and rural
schools in Chile. It follows a rigorous selection process that
allows for identification of college graduates with
competencies to become not only great teachers, but also
leaders and social entrepreneurs. The hypothesis is that
when teachers posses these competencies, the students’
Copyright © IDB 2012
Inter-American Development Bank
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The information and opinions presented in this document are entirely those of the
author(s), and no endorsement by the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board
of Executive Directors, or the countries they represent is expressed or implied.
This document may be freely reproduced.
socio-emotional skills may be enhanced. None of the impact evaluations of Teach for
America address the effect of this kind of program on socio-emotional abilities. To test this
hypothesis, among others, for the first time the Inter-American Development Bank
partnered with Enseña Chile, the Center for Public Policies (PP-UC) at the Catholic
University of Chile, the Center for Measurement (MIDE-UC) at the same university, and
Grupo Educativo to conduct an evaluation of Enseña Chile. This evaluation involved the
application of a battery of tests and questionnaires to measure changes in learning outcomes in
Math and Spanish, in intellectual and socio-emotional abilities, and to collect data about teachers
and students’ socioeconomic background. Information was collected from treatment and
comparison groups twice during the 2010 academic year 1, with the baseline conducted in May
and the follow-up in November. The total sample (both ECh participants and the comparison
group) includes 4,618 students in their first year of secondary school, 117 teachers and 57
schools.
Measuring Socio-Emotional Abilities
Two types of socio-emotional abilities were measured in students, namely self-esteem and
social skills. Both instruments are self-applied and have been designed by MIDE-UC. The
instrument for self-esteem follows the widely-used method of Rosenberg scales with two
different wording frames: positively and negatively worded items. The specific instrument
used here consists of 10 items with the objective of measuring self-esteem as a global and onedimensional construct. In addition, this instrument has the advantage of including both positive
and negative frames to minimize response bias. In particular, “[n]egatively worded items act as
cognitive speed bumps that require respondents to engage in more controlled, as opposed to
automatic, cognitive processing” (Chen, Redina-Gobidoff and Dedrick, 2010). This means that
these modules will tend to offset any biased perceptions and rather reveal the true perception
with regards to student’s self-esteem.
The instrument for measuring social skills includes 20 items, divided into 3 major
categories: personal relationships and peer participation, conflict resolution, and aspects
related to assertive communication. An example of an item of this instrument is “I am able to
express disagreement with another person without offending him/her”.
ECh Teachers Improve Students’ Overall Socio-Emotional Abilities
Baseline data indicate that students who have an ECh teacher (“treatment”) and students
who have a traditional teacher (“comparison”) have the same reported levels of self-esteem
and social skills. However, at follow-up we find that ECh-benefited students show
statistically significant higher scores in the two socio-emotional ability tests (self-esteem
and social skills) than comparison students. The difference between ECh students and the
comparison group in the self-esteem measure is 2.8 points (or 78% of the standard deviation at
baseline) and 3.1 points in the social skills measure (40% of the standard deviation at baseline),
which are of important magnitude considering the short time between the baseline and follow-up
1 To generate a comparison sample, we use propensity score matching (PSM). PSM matches students that participated in the program with
students that did not, in terms of observable characteristics. The propensity score is estimated using a probit model where the dependent variable is
a dummy indicating if the student participated in the program or not. After estimating the student-level probability model, the probability of
participating in the ECh program is computed for each student, matching comparison students using the nearest neighbor technique.
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measurements. Further research should confirm strict causality and the magnitude of the effects;
however, these results provide important evidence about the first years of the program.
Disentangling the ECh Effect on
Socio-Emotional Abilities
Results presented so far do not tell which specific
areas are driving the overall effect. Thus, we estimate
the ECh effect separately on positive and negativeworded items, and along the distribution of social
skills 21 . Findings indicate that students who have ECh
teachers show significantly higher increases on their
own positive perceptions than students who have
traditional teachers, while differences between EChbenefited students and the comparison group for
negative-worded items are close to zero and
statistically insignificant. The finding that ECh can be
positively associated with higher increases of the
positively worded responses indicates that ECh teachers
seem to change self-esteem over time predominantly
through transmitting positive attitudes. These results
are consistent with the program’s objectives of
attracting and placing teachers that encourage selfconfidence (instead of self-depreciation) in their
students.
ECh teachers also seem to have significant effects
on their students’ social skills, as compared to Figure 1: The Effect of an ECh Teacher
traditional teachers. Within an academic year, students on Students’ Socio-Emotional Abilities
in the lowest end of the social skills distribution who
have an ECh teacher show an increase of around onethird of a standard deviation compared to students with Source: Own computations based on Enseña Chile
traditional teachers, even after controlling for learning 2010 baseline and follow-up databases.
outcome differences in Math and Spanish between Notes: *** indicates statistical significance at 1%
baseline and follow-up.
2 These estimates are shown in Figure 2. The bars show the difference between ECh students and non-ECh students in the change in the levels of
measured skills after one school year. The left side of figure 2 presents the estimates of four different models used for estimating the association of
an ECh teacher with the different self-esteem subtests, while the right side coefficients from quantile regressions that break the distribution of the
social skills scores in equal sizes.
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Figure 2: ECh Teachers and Students’ Self-Esteem and Social Skills
Source: Own computations based on Enseña Chile 2010 baseline and follow-up databases. Notes: * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant
at 1%. Social skills coefficients are estimated using quantile regression with bootstrapped standard errors. “Controlling for differences in cognitive scores”
means that results in Spanish and math tests were included among the right-hand-side variables as controls.
Concluding Remarks and Perspectives
Socio-emotional skills are proving to be as important as cognitive abilities to achieve positive
results in the labor market and society in general. The challenge that arises then is to find
successful interventions that can effectively foster those relevant “soft” skills (as well as cognitive
abilities). Using innovative instruments to measure students’ socio-emotional abilities, the IDB
and its partners aimed at making a contribution by collecting this type of information from the
Enseña Chile program in 2010. Most attitudes and characteristics prevalent in ECh teachers point
to developing socio-emotional skills among children in a crucial age. Still, the approach used by
ECh of incorporating motivated teachers with leadership attributes needs to be tested further at a
national scale. The results presented in this note constitute an important first step to highlight
areas of future research.
References
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Carneiro, P. and Heckman, J. (2003). Human Capital Policy. IZA Discussion Papers 821, Institute
for the Study of Labor.
Chen, Y., Rendina-Gobioff, G. and Dedrick, R. (2010). Factorial Invariance of a Chinese SelfEsteem Scale for Third and Sixth Grade Students: Evaluating Method Effects Associated with
Positively and Negatively Worded Items. The International Journal of Educational and Psychological
Assessment, 6(1), 21-35.
Heckman, J., Stixrud, J. and Urzua, S. (2006). The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities
on Labor Market Outcomes and Social Behavior. Journal of Labor Economics, 24(3), 411-482.
Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the Adolescent Self-Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
About the Authors
Mariana Alfonso and Marina Bassi are specialists in the Education Division at the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB). Christian Borja is a consultant for the Education Division of the IDB.
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