Psychometric Validation of the Teachers’ Social and Emotional Learning Belief Scale for Use With Jamaican Primary School Teachers

Abstract

While Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) often facilitates positive child outcomes, understanding of teachers’ implementation role remains limited due to insufficient measurement tools, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This study evaluated the Teacher SEL Belief Scale (TSBS) with 249 Jamaican primary school teachers, examining factor structure and measurement invariance across grades and teaching experience levels. Results confirmed the original three-factor construct and demonstrated full measurement invariance across both grades taught and teaching experience levels. These findings validate TSBS use in high-demand-low-resource contexts like Jamaica, benefiting researchers, school psychologists, and education stakeholders implementing SEL practices.

Keywords

psychometric validity SEL primary education Jamaica

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) develops children’s social, emotional, and behavioral skills through emotional self-awareness, relationship skills, and problem-solving strategies (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning [CASEL], 2002). Schools facilitate SEL, particularly in the elementary phase where all children receive mandatory education (McClelland et al., 2017). Early social and emotional competency is linked to later life outcomes including labor market success (Heckman & Kautz, 2012), decreased criminal behavior (Durlak et al., 2010), and protection against mental health difficulties (Greenberg et al., 2001).

SEL’s potential impact on personal, social, and health outcomes is well-established (see e.g., Wigelsworth et al., 2022); however, variability in implementation success persists (Cipriano et al., 2023). Recent research has focused on teachers as intervention implementers (Durlak et al., 2011). Teachers’ beliefs relate to SEL practice (Zinsser et al., 2015), with positive perceptions linked to competence-seeking (Buchanan et al., 2009; Triliva & Poulou, 2006) and greater utilization of SEL practice (Hollingsworth & Winter, 2013; Ransford et al., 2009). Importantly, explicit knowledge of SEL programming is not necessary for willingness to implement SEL-consistent teaching practices (Esen-Aygun & Sahin-Taskin, 2017). Rather, beliefs and attitudes relate to teachers’ motivation to gain additional knowledge and skill (Brackett et al., 2012). Studies show a positive relationship between teachers’ perceptions of SEL and their implementation frequency and fidelity (Clayback et al., 2023; Domitrovich et al., 2019). Conversely, teachers with lower belief in SEL were less likely to devote time to implementation (Schultz et al., 2010). Understanding teachers’ beliefs is therefore crucial for establishing implementation readiness and supporting quality.

The Teachers’ Social and Emotional Learning Belief Scale (TSBS)

The Teachers’ Social and Emotional Learning Belief Scale (TSBS) (Brackett et al., 2012) is a brief self-report instrument assessing teacher preparedness for SEL implementation across three domains; Comfort, Commitment, and Culture. Accordingly, the TSBS differs from generic scales measuring teacher self-efficacy (e.g., Gálvez-Neito et al., 2023) or knowledge of SEL strategies (e.g., Buchanan et al., 2009). The TSBS has been used to relate teacher beliefs to teaching efficacy (Collie et al., 2012), teacher–student relationships (Poulou, 2017), and implementation fidelity (Lee et al., 2019). The TSBS consistently demonstrates a stable three-factor structure across different contexts, including the original validation with Catholic school teachers in New York (Brackett et al., 2012), U.S. Midwestern suburban teachers (Miller & Li, 2023) and rural Malawian teachers (Lee et al., 2019). However, Lee and Zuilkowski (2022), as the only non-Western study examining the psychometric robustness of the TSBS, show lower internal consistency for some subscales (Culture α = .67) compared to the more robust reliability estimates in the U.S. studies (typically α > .74).

Multi-group invariance testing is a crucial aspect of psychometric validation because it establishes whether latent constructs are measured identically across groups (Meredith, 1993). Without this foundational step, any observed differences in structural relationships could be artifactual rather than substantive (Maassen et al., 2023), reflecting measurement bias rather than true differences in underlying beliefs about SEL implementation (Goerdt et al., 2024; La Salle et al., 2021). Establishing invariance across grades taught and teaching experience is particularly important because, whereas extant literature reports variance in respect to how SEL is perceived by teachers of different grades and teaching experience (Hamilton & Doss, 2020; Tom, 2012), there remains no multi group testing to ensure observed differences are genuine differences in teachers’ SEL perceptions, rather than due to differential item functioning. Therefore, although initial results are promising, there remains an urgent need to establish the suitability of such instruments across international contexts as SEL is increasingly seen as a global phenomenon with potential utility in non-Western settings (Cook et al., 2022; Goodman, 2021; Hayashi et al., 2022).

The Jamaican Context

Jamaica exemplifies a high-demand-low-resource context. School and societal violence is a prominent, national issue, with schools characterized as unsafe environments (Baker-Henningham et al., 2009; Bourne & McLymont, 2020), spurring the Jamaica Teachers’ Association to call on the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information to address the issue of violence in schools (Murphy, 2020). SEL is seen as an effective mechanism to reduce youth violence (Bierman & Slotkin, 2024), and efforts to implement school-based programming have begun (e.g., Cook et al., 2022; Francis et al., 2025). In emerging SEL contexts, understanding teachers’ perspectives on these elements can reveal their perceptions of classroom-based social-emotional learning factors and their views on effective implementation strategies. Additionally, given that teacher beliefs shape their instructional approaches, such insights can enhance the probability of successful program delivery moving forward. This understanding can ultimately offer policymakers and educators important information about how prepared the educational system is for SEL integration, establishing a foundation for broader implementation efforts (Sharma et al., 2024).

This study aims to contribute to research in high-demand-low-resource contexts by establishing whether the TSBS is suitable for the Jamaican context, addressing two research questions:

1. To what extent do scores obtained using the TSBS conform to the proposed three-factor structure found by Brackett et al. (2012)?

2. To what extent are scores invariant across grades taught and years spent teaching?

Method

Participants and Procedure

Following institutional ethical approval (reference: 021-12189-21430), participants were recruited through a national online survey examining teacher SEL beliefs. Email requests were sent to all 585 publicly funded primary schools in Jamaica between April–June 2022. Participants needed to be currently employed primary school teachers spending at least 50% of their time in mainstream classroom teaching.

The initial sample comprised 591 responses (∼7% of the target population), however many respondents only completed initial demographic questions. Two hundred forty-nine teachers provided sufficient data (≥50% TSBS completion), representing ∼3% of all Jamaican elementary teachers. Although participants did not always report sociodemographic data (Table 1), missing data for individual items were extremely minimal (49 cases total, with only 3 participants missing more than 3 TSBS items; a total of 0.94% of missing data for the items). Accordingly, data was not subject to additional treatment. The average teaching experience was 14 years, 10 months (SD = 10 years).

Table 1.

Demographic Characteristics

Regional education authority	n
Kingston and St. Andrew	12
St. Thomas, Portland and St. Mary	35
St. Ann and Trelawny	10
St. James, Hanover and Westmoreland	86
St. Elizabeth and Manchester	8
Clarendon	26
St. Catherine	31
Missing	40
Grades taught
Grades 1–3	90
Grades 4–6	109
Across both grades	47
Missing	2
Years teaching
0–5 years	59
6–10 years	38
11–15 years	35
16–20 years	38
>20 years	72
Missing	6

Instruments

Minimal sociodemographic data were collected due to privacy concerns. Participants could report their geographical region, parish, years teaching, and grade mainly taught (lower primary (ages 6–9); upper primary (ages 10–12); or across both). Responses represented all administrative regions of Jamaica.

Participants completed the TSBS, which consists of three subscales measured by 12 items total:

1. Comfort (confidence in teaching SEL, e.g., “I am comfortable providing instruction on social and emotional skills to my students”).

2. Commitment (desire to participate in SEL training and teaching, e.g., “I would like to attend a workshop to learn how to develop my students’ social and emotional skills”).

3. Culture (perception of school-wide support for SEL, e.g., “My principal creates an environment that promotes children’s social and emotional skills”).

All items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (Strongly Agree) to 5 (Strongly Disagree). Previous reliability estimates were acceptable (Miller & Li, 2023): Comfort ω = .76; Commitment ω = .85; Culture ω = .90.

Results

Means, standard deviations, skewness, and kurtosis values are presented in Table 2.

Table 2.

Descriptive Statistics for the 12 Items From the Teacher SEL Beliefs Scale

Domain	Label	Item description	x̄	SD	Skew	Kurtosis
Comfort	Comf1	I feel confident in my ability to provide instruction on social and emotional learning	3.81	0.91	−0.89	0.72
	Comf2	I am comfortable providing instruction on social and emotional skills to my student	4.00	0.83	−1.05	1.55
	Comf3	Taking care of my students’ social and emotional needs comes naturally to me	4.07	0.88	−0.88	0.55
	Comf4	Informal lessons in social and emotional learning are part of my regular teaching practice	4.10	0.82	−1.02	1.165
Commitment	Comt1	I would like to attend a workshop to learn how to develop my students’ social and emotional skills	4.18	0.84	−1.31	2.36
	Comt2	I would like to attend a workshop to develop my own social and emotional skills	4.03	0.98	−1.27	1.48
	Comt3	I want to improve my ability to teach social and emotional skills to students	4.24	0.73	−1.54	4.93
	Comt4	All teachers should receive training on how to teach social and emotional skills to students	4.39	0.91	−2.00	4.37
Culture	Cul1	My principal creates an environment that promotes social and emotional learning for our students	3.70	0.96	−0.88	0.77
	Cul2	The culture in my school supports the development of children’s social and emotional skills	3.72	0.91	−0.77	0.73
	Cul3	My principal does not encourage the teaching of social and emotional skills to students (reverse scored)	4.01	0.88	−0.66	−0.07
	Cul4	My school expects teachers to address children’s social and emotional needs	3.79	0.84	−0.88	1.14

To examine the extent to which a three-factor structure is present when the TSBS is utilized with Jamaican primary-school teachers, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted using MPLUS version 7.4 with Maximum Likelihood with Robust standard errors (MLR) given skew in data. Model fit was assessed using the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI), Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR).

Results supported a well-fitting model (Hu & Bentler, 1999) (X² (48) = 57.052, p = .17) (CFI = 0.962, TLI = 0.950, RMSEA = 0.047, SRMR = 0.053). Modification indices suggested adding error covariances between Comfort items 1 and 2 (error correlation = .336), 1 and 3 (error correlation = −.381), and 2 and 4 (error correlation = −.064). This suggests respondents didn’t differentiate between comfort and confidence in SEL instruction. Error covariance within the Comfort domain has been previously recognized (Lee et al., 2019). Allowing covariance improved model fit (CFI = 0.988, TLI = 0.983, RMSEA = 0.028, SRMR = 0.047).

All items showed factor loadings of at least 0.6 (MacCallum et al., 2001) except for one Comfort item (“Informal lessons in social and emotional learning are part of my regular teaching practice,” loading = .580) and one Culture item (“My school expects teachers to address children’s social and emotional needs,” loading = .340). Model fit did not improve with item removal, so they were retained. Results support a three-factor model consistent with previous studies (Brackett et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2019; Miller & Li, 2023) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Confirmatory factor analysis of the teachers’ SEL Belief Scale

To examine construct comparability, we conducted measurement invariance tests by grade taught (lower primary, upper primary, across both lower and upper primary) and years teaching experience (0–5 years, 6–10 years, 11–15 years, 16–20 years, and >20 years) (Table 3). Model testing included a configural invariance model (equality of factor structure), metric invariance model (equality of factor loadings), and scalar invariance model (equality of item intercepts). Metric and scalar invariance was assessed by comparing CFI difference with the configural model, with a CFI change below .01 indicating full measurement invariance (Cheung & Rensvold, 2002).

Table 3.

Invariance Testing Across Year-Group Taught and Years Teaching

Model	CFI	ΔCFI*	TLI	RMSEA	RMSEA 90% CI	SRMR	S-Bχ²	df
Across grades taught
Configural invariance	.890	—	.849	.096	[.077, .0116]	.089	253.930**	144
Metric invariance	.891	.001	.867	.091	[.071, .109]	.138	270.963**	162
Scalar invariance	.886	.005	.874	.088	[.069, .106]	.148	294.075**	180
Across years of teaching experience
Configural invariance	.840	—	.780	.132	[.113, .151]	.101	442.871**	240
Metric invariance	.848	.008	.818	.120	[.101, .139]	.155	468.765**	276
Scalar invariance	.835	.005	.825	.118	[.100, .135]	.171	520.996**	312

**p < .01.

For grade taught, the configural invariance model showed acceptable fit (Hu & Bentler, 1999) (CFI = 0.890, TLI = 0.849, RMSEA = 0.096, SRMR = 0.089). In the absence of strong theoretical grounding for redefining the construct in light of acceptable fit (i.e., there are no “stand out” factor loading issues identified between groups) contrasted with an expected comparative degradation in optimal model fit as sample size reduces though the use of multi-group comparisons (Fischer & Karl, 2019), we consider that there is a case for accepting configural invariance. CFI difference was minimal, indicating full measurement invariance regarding factor loadings and intercepts. This suggests the TSBS performs equivalently across all grade categories of Jamaican primary education.

For years teaching, configural invariance testing showed moderately acceptable fit (CFI = 0.840, TLI = 0.780, RMSEA = 0.132, SRMR = 0.101), comparable to results shown for the year-group multi-group analysis, with no identification of extreme cases of problematic factor loadings, save the low item loading of Culture item 4, as indicated previously. CFI difference did not exceed the .01 threshold for both metric and scalar models, indicating non-invariance. Post-hoc analysis revealed the Comfort subscale did not achieve either metric or scalar invariance, while Commitment and Culture achieved metric (but not scalar) invariance, indicating partial non-invariance of these scales.

Discussion

This study examined TSBS validity and reliability in a high-demand-low-resource context with Jamaican elementary teachers. Results indicate the suitability of the TSBS for use in this context, adding to literature on its applicability outside US/Euro-centric settings (Lee et al., 2019). A key and yet unexamined element of the tool is that measurement fit was deemed ultimately acceptable for use across teachers with varying years of experience (which we believe is likely to be the most likely scenario in the use of the measure).

Regarding RQ1, results supported the three-factor structure established by Brackett et al. (2012) and later studies (Lee et al., 2019; Miller & Li, 2023). A note of caution concerns the poor factor loading of the Culture item “My school expects teachers to address children’s social and emotional needs” (loading = .339), which falls below general benchmarks for acceptability (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). This may reflect that many teachers are unaware that SEL is part of their curricula (Schiepe-Tiska et al., 2021), which could explain poor factor loadings if there is inconsistent knowledge about school, regional, or national policy. Future studies should distinguish between countries with and without established SEL policies.

Regarding RQ2, results supported full invariance across grades taught and years teaching experience. This addresses a significant lack of research on SEL instruments in high-demand-low-resource countries. The TSBS can potentially be deployed at scale to provide a national picture of teachers’ beliefs, establish benchmarks for policy goals, and evaluate training effectiveness. However, post-hoc testing revealed that individual TSBS factors should not be used independently, as they did not achieve full invariance.

Limitations and Future Directions

Despite promising initial response rates, significant non-response created potential bias risk. However, the final sample size is comparable to prior validation studies. Without further school and teacher level demographics, we cannot confirm intended national representativeness, though data represents all Jamaican administrative regions. We consider the sample sufficient in power for support of the three-factor model (Wolf et al., 2013). Regarding multi-group testing, group sizes did not meet recommended minimum numbers of cases per group (Kline, 2016). Chen (2007) noted that insufficient sample sizes lead to low statistical power for detecting lack of invariance, potentially resulting in falsely accepting invariant models. Consequently, sample size may explain why there was not stronger evidence of measurement invariance. Alternatively, non-invariance across teaching experience could be a result of evolving professional understanding or career-stage related priorities, consistent with wider models of teacher development. Broadly, we propose that teachers move from concerns about self, to concerns about tasks, to concerns about students and the impact of teaching (Conway & Clark, 2003; Fuller, 1969).

Future research should prioritize several key measurement directions for the TSBS. First, longitudinal invariance testing is needed to examine whether the scale functions equivalently across time points, particularly as teachers gain SEL experience through professional development. Second, validation studies conducted across diverse educational contexts are essential to establish the scale’s cross-cultural applicability beyond the current Western-dominated samples. Third, research should explore partial invariance models when full invariance is not achieved, determining which parameters can be freely estimated while maintaining meaningful group comparisons. Finally, researchers should investigate the practical implications of non-invariance by examining how measurement differences translate to real-world decision-making about SEL implementation readiness. These directions would strengthen the TSBS as a robust tool for supporting evidence-based SEL program development and teacher preparation across diverse educational settings.

By exploring the factor structure and measurement invariance qualities of the TSBS in Jamaica, this study contributes to theory and practice. Understanding of the cross-cultural applicability of beliefs about SEL is strengthened, and evidence for a valuable tool for education professionals is provided. This supports teacher development in the implementation of school-based SEL interventions, for instance, through benchmarking of teachers’ comfort and commitment to SEL, creation of teacher profiles for more targeted training, and tailoring of pre-implementation training.

Conclusion

There remains a need for robust instrumentation to examine and support SEL implementation, particularly in high-demand-low-resource contexts where constraints are prevalent and research instrumentation is underdeveloped. This study contributes to the SEL field by providing evidence of a measure suitable for use in research and practice, providing empirical support for assumptions of universality of Western findings by promoting work outside these contexts. The study also offers a valuable tool for assessing training and development needs for SEL implementation. Findings help support the global movement of SEL.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Michael Wigelsworth

Ethical Considerations

This study was approved by the University of Manchester’s Research Ethics Committee (UREC) 1 on 09/12/2021 (reference: Ref: 2021-12189-21430).

Consent to Participate

Participants provided opt-in informed consent through completion of survey data, after being presented with a participant information sheet, as per institutional approval.

Consent for Publication

Informed consent for publication was provided by the participants as part of the opt-in consent procedure.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by funding from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data Availability Statement

Anonymized data available upon request.*

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