Teachers’ Perceptions of Refugee Students’ SEL Competencies and Academic Outcomes

Abstract

The humanitarian crises in Syria has displaced millions of children, who, given resulting trauma experiences and barriers to education, are especially subject to adverse learning and mental health outcomes (Sirin & Rogers-Sirin, 2015). In Western contexts the Teacher Expectancy Effect (TEE) predicts academic outcomes and can further anticipate life outcomes (i.e., graduation, career success, criminality) (Gilbert, 1995; Neisser et al., 1996). Early research on the TEE focused on academic skills, however in recent years these efforts have expanded to account for social and emotional skills (Alvidrez & Weinstein, 1999; Baker et al., 2015; Ho & Cherng, 2018). This study aims to examine whether and how demographic characteristics and teachers’ perceptions of refugee children’s social and emotional skills are associated with changes in academic learning outcomes.

Sample. Data was derived from a large-scale cluster randomized control trial evaluating a new social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum for Syrian refugee children enrolled in non-formal remedial education programming in the Bekaa and Akkar regions of Lebanon. Participants were 3,262 children aged 5 to 15 (M=8.97, SD = 2.32; 49.3% female) in treatment conditions. Data was collected at 2 time points: November-December 2016 and May 2017.

Results. Descriptive statistics revealed comparatively low average scores for hyperactivity and externalizing behavior (M = .532, SD = .511) and emotional distress and internalizing behavior (M = .283, SD = .312). Ordered logistic regressions indicated that higher teacher-reports of inhibitory control, working memory and prosocial behavior and social acceptance at baseline were associated with greater odds of a child demonstrating higher literacy, numeracy and second language levels at endline, adjusting for baseline levels of academic skills. Given the similar odds ratios of teacher-reports of working memory and prosocial behavior in predicting academic outcomes, the findings of this study provides initial support for SEL interventions that target prosocial behavior, which is believed to be more malleable to change than working memory, and can potentially result in increased marginal gains to students' academic outcomes and program effectiveness.