Editorial [International Journal of Emotional Education, 18(1)]

Abstract

As wellbeing and social and emotional education continue to be integrated into educational systems across the globe, more attention is being paid to the assessment of social and emotional competences, particularly assessment modes making use of direct and technology-based assessment. Technology based situational judgement tests are particularly useful in providing more ecologically valid evaluation whilst being less susceptible to bias. In the first paper in this edition, Scully and colleagues (Ireland) have developed an innovative animated Wellbeing Situational Judgement Test (WB-SJT) to evaluate secondary school students’ learning of wellbeing in social and emotional education classes. The authors discuss how they developed the tool and then sought to validate it with over 300 middle school students in Ireland. The results suggest that while further work needs to be undertaken to strengthen and refine the test, its psychometric properties and contextual relevance, underline its potential for both formative and summative assessment of wellbeing and emotional education.