Is it Necessary to Measure Japanese College Students' Social Skills?

Volumes of research show that social and emotional skills play a central role in shaping student achievement, workplace readiness, and adult wellbeing (Chien, Harbin et al., 2012). Therefore, it is necessary to effectively integrate social and emotional learning into our classrooms and programs. The big challenge is to design a tool to assess the social and emotional skills, which teachers and school administrators can use to help students develop them. This research designs a tool to measure Japanese university students social skills. The tool has five components, which measure social competence, academic self-efficacy, mastery orientation, self-control and persistence. It was pilot-tested to 115 university students and the 20-item tool revealed very high item reliability of .865 ~ .881. The results of the pilot study revealed that although a majority of the students displayed the social behaviors and considered them important to become successful in school, some students did not exert any effort to use those skills because they did not consider them necessary for academic success. Others used those skills, but they thought these social skills were not necessary for making them successful in school.