Programs for social and emotional skills development for early and preschool children applied in European Countries : Compendium

Abstract

With a compendium that counts almost 150 pages, the EU-SELF project team offers a thorough collection of Social and Emotional Learning programs. The 59 programs as shown in this compendium, are the result of an international systematic search by all nine project partners from
six different countries in even more different languages. Only programs that included all four criteria
considering age, origin, scope and content were held back for reviewing. However, the search was systematic and based on both existing databases and new searches (as shown in the
methodology), there is a possibility that other relevant programs were not found by the review team and were therefore
incorrectly not included in this compendium. However, would this only strengthen our first point of attention: the need for a centralized and international database that not only contains verified content of each program, but also includes practice- or evidence based research about the program. As both private businesses and universities create and offer those programs, a frame of references in quality shows to be necessary. All collected programs are already used in practice, but only some of them are based on research or show the impact and effect of the project in independent research. That brings a second point to discussion: the amount of evidence-based programs that tangle the element of SEL are limited. For reasons unknown, the EU-SELF team only found a few evidence based practices or was only in limited cases able to discover if a program was evidence based. Without questioning the effectiveness of the non-evidence based programs, the question rises why there is so little evidence. A third impression made by the EU-SELF team, is the one of perspective. What perspective on SEL is dominant and what other perspectives can also be of value? Where are gaps in the existing practices and what research is needed to discover what fits best in the long term? With the 59 practices in this compendium, the review descriptions and these questions, we hope to have both inspired as conflicted you to reflect on these and other initiatives of SEL.