Enhancing Student Success through Social Emotional Competence Development

Identifying the path to achieving academic performance and social success is the desire of any student at the beginning of their career. A number of studies have attempted to identify the factors that contribute to social success and academic performance and have found the following: external factors such as (gender, parent’s education level, and high school GPA) and internal factors (intrapersonal - self-confidence, self-control, emotional health, managing anxiety and stress and interpersonal-involvement and development of relationships). This chapter focuses on internal factors that contribute to social and academic success, in short, on students’ socio-emotional competencies, and presents the concept of emotional intelligence, its approaches, and its component elements. Afterward, the chapter describes the concept of socio-emotional skills and socio-emotional learning, so that in the last part of the chapter we propose a model of training socio-emotional competencies, a set of activities that was implemented experimentally for 3 years within an institutional development program in the field of educational counseling. Conclusion and recommendations regarding the importance of counseling services offered to students will also be mentioned