A social emotional competence perspective: promoting students’ social decision-making and emotional management through socio-scientific issues learning

Abstract In the face of risks and challenges in a technologically driven society, cultivating versatile talents with both scientific literacy and social emotional competence (SEC) is crucial. Socio-scientific issues (SSI) teaching, characterized by its social contextuality, multidisciplinarity, and criticality, aligns perfectly with the development of SEC in both its processes and goals. Therefore, this study combines social emotional competence development strategies to construct an Emotional-Decision Making Integrated SSI Instructional Model (EDM-SSI Instructional Model), which includes five stages: Introduce SSI, Establish standards, Dialectic analysis, Reason and make decisions, Reflect and optimize. Two rounds of issue-based teaching were conducted among 12th grade students recruited in China. This study examines the changes and influencing factors of students’ social decision-making abilities and emotional management abilities in SSI learning by analyzing the data from the social decision-making questionnaire, learning task sheets, and emotional process reports of high school students during SSI learning. The research results indicate that EDM-SSI teaching significantly improved students’ social decision-making abilities, especially in the optimization and innovation dimension; students’ emotional awareness and expression abilities were also enhanced; while students tended to adopt response suppression strategies for emotion regulation, cognitive reappraisal strategies proved more beneficial, requiring more guidance from teachers.