How to foster emotional competence in primary and secondary students: Development of evidence-based interventions

The aim of the presentation is to describe some findings on different interventions that were implemented to promote primary and secondary school students’ emotional competence through online and on-site teaching. Emotional competence is the ability to express, understand, and regulate emotion. This ability is crucial for students’ social interactions, well-being, and school learning. It is also related to students’ achievement emotions, as those emotions regarding learning activities and outcomes. Moreover, developing students’ emotional competence can be a viable way to increase their resilience in relation to a variety of disasters. I present four evidence-based interventions which were tested with Italian primary and secondary school students in four different contexts, through on-site and online activities. The first intervention promoted students’ emotional competence in terms of abilities to recognize and regulate emotions. The second intervention focused on students’ achievement emotions and emotion regulation strategies deputed to manage them. The third and fourth intervention regarded students’ emotional competence in general and concerning natural disasters, specifically earthquakes (according to a preventive perspectives) and epidemics/pandemics (during the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic). Teachers can implement evidence-based actions derived by the different interventions, to foster primary and secondary school students’ emotional competence in a variety of contexts.