Research reveals that social and emotional learning (SEL) improves grade school students’ engagement with the academic curriculum. With online learning, it is still unclear how students have been negatively impacted, but lack of teacher-student relationships and low motivations appear to be strong contributors. Furthermore, there has been speculation that the fear and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic increased mental illness among children. Dr. Tracy Bennett, Founder of GetKidsInternetSafe, said she has never seen the quantity of clients looking for outpatient psychotherapy or such high severity levels among adults and kids in her 25-year career as a clinical psychologist. She added that, in response to the child; and family distress, teachers have been heroic in their creation, adoption, and application of SEL curricula. In service of the positives of screen use, today’s GKIS article recommends SEL apps that can be used at home as well as in the classroom.
The Benefits of Social and Emotional Learning
Improves Behavior and Academic Performance
SEL programs tend to target:
Self-awareness in recognizing emotions, strengths, and limitations
Self-management by controlling emotions and behaviors
Social awareness in gaining insight into others and building empathy towards diverse backgrounds
Relationship skills in forming and maintaining healthy relationships
Decision making in acting upon productive choices[1][3]
Students use SEL skills to protect against substance use, bullying, and school failures among other benefits. The ability of teachers and parents to form a safe care environment with SEL results in less emotional distress, fewer conduct problems, and improves test scores and grades among children.[1]
Do SEL programs work?
A long-term study by Taylor and colleagues (2017) collected 18 years’ worth of data from 46 studies to examine if SEL programs make a difference. The SEL programs had students apply learned skills to personal development, social relationships, ethical behaviors, and productive work at school. This increased subject physical and mental well-being into adulthood demonstrating a positive trend in future social relationships, graduate rates and attendance, and low numbers of arrests.[3]
A study by Jones and colleagues (2015) found similar conclusions. They measured kindergartens’ future wellness in education, employment, crime, substance abuse, and mental health. Their data showed:
High self-control at an early age
High task completion rate
Improves multi-skill management
Improves organizational skills
Improve noncognitive skills (e.g., motivation, integrity, and interpersonal interaction)[2]
Taylor et al. also found that a “one size fits all” SEL program is not as effective as one designed specifically for a selected student population and a selected outcome. For example, according to their study students with ethnic minority backgrounds developed better emotional coping skills with SEL. In contrast, poor-income students developed better school attachment and achievement. Other benefits for SEL included decreased substance use, risk-taking, and problem behaviors while improving positive relationships using social support and growth opportunities amongst minorities.[3]
Friendly and Productive Tools for Long Term Success
Achieve screen sanity and SEL skills with our own Screen Safety Essentials Course. To help your family form cooperative dialogue and teach critical problem-solving skills about your child’s online and offline life, we offer weekly coaching videos from our very own Parenting and Screen Safety Expert, Dr. Tracy Bennett. Designed for families with kids ages 8 to 16, our GKIS Screen Safety Essentials Course does the work for you. No more wondering what to say, which issues to cover, and how to stay relevant and consistent about screen safety and family connection.
Some of the resources the Screen Safety Essentials Course offers include:
✅ Weekly parents-only videos with the information and tools you need to earn the credibility to be their go-to expert
✅ Weekly family videos with insider and science-based teaching topics and fun family activities.
✅ Workbook pages and colorful infographic downloads
✅ Access to Dr. Bennett’s BEST webinars
✅ Psychological wellness and balance skills to avoid costly digital injuries
✅ Exclusive access to Dr. B and motivated parents like yourself on our private Facebook community page
✅ Options for private coaching with Dr. Bennett for extra support
✅ BONUS: Selected readings from our GKIS Blog articles and Dr. B’s book SCREEN TIME IN THE MEAN TIME
Safety, connection, less conflict, and so much more! Your first 30 days are totally free. Available through our GetKidsInternetSafe website.
Middle School Confidential
GKIS also recommends the Middle School Confidential app. Middle School Confidential offers a three-piece comic book series for ages 8-14 by Annie Fox and Matt Kindt. It covers lessons about character, problem-solving, friendships, and school situations. Quizzes, tips, real quotes from teens, and real-world resources support problem-solving and open dialogue skills between parents and children.[5] Specific tools like assertiveness and positive self-talk help users recognize and name emotions and build empathy.
The Positive Penguin application offers 5-minute meditation practices for child resilience. Developers incorporated funny sounds and game modes to set a friendly environment. According to their website, Positive Penguin is “the app designed to help children understand why they feel a certain feeling and behave in a productive way.” The app helps children transform negative thoughts and emotions into a more optimistic perspective.[6] Positive Penguin helps kids improve SEL communication and problem-solving skills.
Smiling Mind helps children seek mindfulness as a daily practice. Developed by psychologists and educators, this app encourages children ages 3 to 18 to reduce stress, tension, pressure, and challenges with a 10-minute meditation.[7] With daily check-ins, a meditation habit assists kids to form positive affirmations by thinking before they act.
Availability:
Apple App Store
Google Play Store.
Accomplishments
#22 in rank for Health & Fitness (as of 15 Feb 2021)
5 million users leading Meditation app for Australia
To improve communication and empathy skills in your family, grab your SEL app of choice today! Thanks to CSUCI intern, Christian Sandoval for his contributions to today’s GKIS article.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Onward to More Awesome Parenting,
Tracy S. Bennett, Ph. D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
GetKidsInternetSafe
[1] Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta‐analysis of school‐based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csuci.edu/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x
[2] Damon E. Jones, Mark Greenberg, and Max Crowley, 2015:
[3] Taylor, R. D., Oberle, E., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2017). Promoting positive youth development through school‐based social and emotional learning interventions: A meta‐analysis of follow‐up effects. Child Development, 88(4), 1156–1171. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csuci.edu/10.1111/cdev.12864
[4] Sawyer, M. G., Arney, F. M., Baghurst, P. A., Clark, J. J., Graetz, B. W., Kosky, R. J., et al. (2001). The mental health of young people in Australia: Key findings from the child and adolescent component of the national survey of mental health and well-being. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 35, 806-814.
Are you fighting the homework wars? Wondering if screens during homework are helping or hurting grades? We can’t take screens away during homework time anymore. So much of it is online! Kids insist that tech helps them learn better. But does it? Today’s GKIS article covers who tech can help with learning and how it can interfere.
How We Learn
We have to have a good memory to earn good grades. To learn, we must encode, or anchor, that information into brain memory storage. This type of learning happens as we engage with the material over and over. Memories also encode while we sleep. Changing short-term memories into long-term memories happens through biochemical and electrical processes called consolidation.
Different types of memories store in different parts of the brain. Memorizing factual information (required to perform well on tests) primarily involves the part of the brain called the temporal cortex. Intentionally learning facts is called explicit memory.
Memorizing how to do something, like tie your shoes, is called procedural learning. It is stored in the areas of the brain that involve motor control. This kind of learning is called implicit memory.
Emotional memories (like those that occur in traumatic situations) are stored in multiple brain areas including our emotional center, the amygdala.
Research suggests that kids studying while watching TV may encode that information as procedural rather than factual data. Encoding in the wrong brain region makes fact retrieval at test time more difficult. How and where you study also makes a difference.
How to Facilitate Learning
To learn well, we must start with great brain health, get motivated, set up a good workstation, and follow best learning practices. Are you practicing these learning techniques?
Good self-care, brain health, and cognitive fitness are the foundations of learning engagement (like sleep, nutrition, exercise, and a positive mood)
A distraction-free study environment
Efforts toward mental engagement: attention and motivation
Putting the learning content in a variety of different formats (listening to a lecture, reading notes, writing notes, re-writing notes, watching videos, engaging in discussion, etc.)
Memorizing material in a variety of study environments
Making unique meaning of the material, such as generalizing and applying the concepts, especially with emotional connections
Repetition and practice
Avoid doing two tasks at once that require the same cognitive resources (don’t multitask)
Uninterrupted brain rest after each study session (mindfulness, meditation, time out in nature)
The Benefits of Screen Time for Learning
Screen devices can be amazing learning aids. Not only do they help us put the material in different formats, but they are fun and convenient to use! Here are some of the ways screen time benefits our learning.
With our screen devices, we have immediate, easy access to massive stores of information.
The biohacks built into our devices make learning fun. We are captured and motivated.
Online quizzes and testing help us immediately assess where we are with our learning.
Learning programs dish out progressively challenging content at a pace that matches our performance.
Screens give us access to others for group discussions and crowdsourcing problems.
Screens offer cool and create learning formats, like project management and brain mapping systems.
Gamifying content helps us learn and have fun!
Best Learning Strategies
1. Learn from the get-go.
Don’t waste a moment of studying. Be an active learner the minute you come into contact with the material. Actively engage with the content while you read the textbook, take notes in class, and watch the videos. Participating in class also helps deep processing of the material!
2. Learn while you format study materials.
Outline the text and rewrite and highlight your notes. Attend to and connect the main concepts. Leave out illustrative details so you have only essential material (fewer pages) to memorize.
3. Set the stage to study.
Block out sufficient study time over several days using a block-scheduling download from the Internet. Prepare yourself and your study space to optimize learning. Make sure you are comfortable and fit (fed, hydrated, rested) with a positive attitude about studying. Find a comfortable, non-distracting study location. Turn off your phone and other notifications and commit to studying only, no social media or Internet surfing.
4. Engage with content, don’t kill and drill.
For a student to learn effectively, they must engage with the content and integrate it into a meaningful framework. Students often make the mistake of mindlessly rehearsing isolated facts, thinking time spent is evidence of learning. Kill and drill is a waste of time and mind-numbingly punishing. Deeply processing information is the best way to learn.
5. Create learning pathways.
Each time we encode a fact into the hippocampal area (memory center) of our brain, we create a learning pathway to that content that can later be traveled for retrieval at test time. Increasing the number of pathways to that encoded fact is the process of effective learning.
In items 2 and 3 of this list, you already paved the initial pathways! The first pathways include when you listened to the lecture, wrote notes, read the textbook, answered the teacher’s questions, and formatted study materials.
To pave additional pathways to test content, find creative ways to further engage with and elaborate on the material while you study. The more emotionally and cognitively meaningful the material is for you, the easier it will be to learn. For example, use the Internet to view the study material in a variety of vivid formats, such as illustrative maps, diagrams, pictures, speeches, or videos. Link the information to emotionally meaningful memories or associated topics. Study from a variety of locations. Form a study group and talk with others about the content.
6. Rehearse the information and practice retrieving it and applying it just like you would at test time.
If the test is multiple-choice, make up questions that would lead to memorized facts. If the test is an essay, practice outlining and writing essays on that material.
7. Study small chunks of material at a time over several days, eventually linking the chunks together.
Don’t cram at the last minute. Your brain needs time to deeply process newly learned material. It will even process when you’re not actively studying, even in your sleep! That means it’s best to learn and rehearse chunks of material over several days. By test time, the chunks will come together for easy, A+ retrieval.
Fostering the love of learning is the best thing we can do with our kids, that means helping them learn better and achieve a healthy balance on- and off-screen. For more learning tips, view my free video, “How to Study Effectively: Metacognition in Action.”
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
