Promoting teachers' wellbeing through a serious game intervention: a qualitative exploration of teachers' experiences

Introduction

Teachers' wellbeing plays a critical role in their overall job satisfaction, motivation, and effectiveness in building supporting learning environments. In today's dynamic educational settings, where teachers often face numerous challenges and stressors, their wellbeing becomes increasingly vital. Consequently, there is an urgent need to innovate and develop targeted training interventions that can support specifically the wellbeing of educators.

Methods

This study sought to provide an overview of the "Online Wellbeing Course - OWC," a serious game developed to enhance teachers' wellbeing, and to investigate the participants' feedback after being engaged in the OWC, utilizing a qualitative approach through focus group discussions. A total of 189 in-service teachers took part in the study. To qualitatively explore their experiences with the OWC, participants were involved in focus groups and asked to provide feedback about how and to what extent the course was beneficial for their wellbeing.

Results

Teachers reported enhancements in areas such as emotional competence, self-care strategies, social awareness, relationship skills, decision-making, and school climate.

Discussion

These outcomes suggested the potential of serious games as an innovative training approach for supporting teachers' wellbeing, offering valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and educators.

Descriptive and Quasi-Experimental Studies about Moral Emotions, Online Empathy, Anger Management, and Their Relations with Key Competencies in Primary Education

BACKGROUND

Antisocial behaviours make social interactions difficult among students. Moral emotions, online empathy, and anger management are social and emotional variables related to prosocial and antisocial behaviours and health problems. This research aims to assess the impact of Cooperative Project-Based Learning intervention on these three variables for Primary Education students. Additionally, the relations of these variables with key competencies, such as social and emotional competencies and literacy competence, were studied.

METHOD

This research is made up of two studies, descriptive and quasi-experimental, during regular school hours. The descriptive study was carried out with a sample of 516 primary school students and aimed to assess the development of the three variables, taking into account personal and ethnic-cultural factors. The quasi-experimental study, with pre-test and post-test data, had the participation of 145 students to study the incidence of these variables after Cooperative Project-Based Learning intervention in Primary Education.

RESULTS

The results show the relation among the cited variables and the positive impact of the intervention on moral emotions and anger management in the experimental group compared to the control group. Experimental group girls presented higher scores in moral emotions than control group girls.

CONCLUSION

These results open new research lines in relation to the intervention as a programme to prevent the appearance of antisocial behaviours and health problems at school.

A Multilevel Analysis of the Relation Between Bullying Roles and Social and Emotional Competencies

This study investigated how social and emotional competencies are related to middle school students' involvement in bullying, and whether class-levels variables influence this association. There were 668 participants (M_age = 12.73, SD = 1.08) who participated in a screening for inclusion in a social and emotional learning program. Results showed that students not involved in bullying displayed higher levels of self-esteem than students involved in bullying in any role (victims, perpetrators, or bully-victims), higher levels of self-control and social awareness than perpetrators and bully-victims, and higher levels of responsible decision making than bully-victims. Gender did not moderate the relation between any bullying roles and social and emotional competencies, but class size moderated the relation between being a bully/victim and self-esteem and between being a bully and self-control. These results supported the relevance of including class-level variables when analyzing the relation between bullying and social and emotional competencies.

Multisource Assessment for Development Purposes: Revisiting the Methodology of Data Analysis

Multisource assessment (MSA) is based on the belief that assessments are valid inferences about an individual's behavior. When used for performance management purposes, convergence of views among raters is important, and therefore testing factor invariance across raters is critical. However, when MSA is used for development purposes, raters usually come from a greater number of contexts, a fact that requires a different data analysis approach. We revisit the MSA data analysis methodology when MSA is used for development, with the aim of improving its effectiveness. First, we argue that having raters from different contexts is an integral element of the assessment, with the trait-context dyad being the actual latent variable. This leads to the specification of an Aggregate (instead of the usual Latent) multidimensional factor model. Second, since data analysis usually aggregates scores for each rater group into a single mean that is then compared with the self-rating score, we propose that the test for factor invariance must also include scalar invariance, a pre-requisite for mean comparison. To illustrate this methodology we conducted a 360° survey on a sample of over 1100 MBA students enrolled in a leadership development course. Finally, by means of the study we show how the survey can be customized to each rater group to make the MSA process more effective.