Character Education to Improve Students’ Sense of Relatedness: Preliminary Findings from the Positivity Project

Abstract

Sense of relatedness is a key component of students’ social-emotional learning, as it captures the degree to which students’ feel they have quality relationships with others in school. The purpose of the current pilot case study is to measure students’ sense of relatedness and assess the degree to which a new character education social-emotional learning program based in positive psychology – The Positivity Project (P2) – is having a positive impact on students. Results from the two case studies including 108 elementary school students and 154 middle school students indicate positive associations between P2 implementation and increases in self-reported sense of relatedness.