Social and emotional competences are the cornerstone of student health and academic achievement, and an important predictor of individual school engagement, educational achievement, career achievement, health, and well-being. It is necessary for universities to understand the general situation of university students' social and emotional competences, conduct needs assessments, and then design social and emotional learning courses that suit students' needs. This study aimed to understand the current situation of university student's social and emotional competences and analyze whether their social and emotional competences were different due to background factors (degree of self-assessed success, gender, grade, and academic achievement), in order to highlight the differences in the needs of university students in social-emotional learning, as a reference for universities to design social-emotional learning courses for university students. In this study, students from a public university in northern Taiwan were selected as the subjects. Convenience sampling was used to conduct an anonymous online survey using the "Social and Emotional Competences and Student Engagement in Youth" questionnaire, using 6-point and 3-point scales, respectively.
The questionnaires were administered from April to June 2020. A total of 229 questionnaires were collected, of which 179 were valid. This article only presents the survey part of "social and emotional competences", including emotion perception and understanding (PU), emotion expression and labeling (EL), emotion management and regulation (MR), and prosocial behavior (PB), and used descriptive statistics to understand the current situation; to understand the difference by t-test, one-way ANOVA and Duncan post hoc comparison. This study found that university students' social and emotional competences were all at or above the average level, but emotional expression and recognition (EL) was a weaker part; social and emotional competences differed due to different self-assessed successes and academic achievements, but no gender and grade differences were found. This study concluded with conclusions and recommendations for future research and university practices to promote social and emotional learning courses and activities.