Students at schools with social-emotional learning report stronger self-regulation and altruism

Primary school students attending an Indonesian Islamic public school that had embedded structured social-emotional learning (SEL) practices into its lessons reported markedly higher self-regulation and altruistic behavior than peers at a nearly identical school that had not, according to a new study published in Discover Education. The comparison involved two public Islamic primary schools, or madrasah, in the Ciputat area of South Tangerang that both operate under Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs and implement the same Love-Based Curriculum, known locally as KBC. Because the only deliberate distinction between the two settings was the adoption of SEL-oriented practices built on the widely used CASEL framework, the study offers a rare window into how global social-emotional learning principles function inside a culturally specific, value-based curriculum.

The research team, led by Siti Masyithoh and colleagues, recruited 100 students through proportional random sampling, drawing 50 participants from each school. The design was quantitative and ex post facto, meaning the researchers did not manipulate any variables but instead examined differences that already existed under natural educational conditions. Group membership was defined at the school level: one school had integrated structured SEL practices into regular instruction, while the comparison school had not implemented such practices explicitly during the study period. Each student completed questionnaires measuring social-emotional learning experiences, self-regulation, and altruistic behavior on four-point Likert scales.

The statistical centerpiece of the study was a Multivariate Analysis of Variance, or MANOVA, chosen because self-regulation and altruistic behavior are interrelated outcomes that benefit from simultaneous testing. Before running the main analysis, the researchers confirmed a strong positive Pearson correlation between the two dependent variables, r = .764, p < .001, meaning students who reported better self-control also tended to report more helping behavior. Because assumption testing revealed departures from normality, unequal variances for self-regulation, and heterogeneity of covariance matrices, the team selected Pillai’s Trace as the primary multivariate statistic, a criterion regarded as the most robust under such violations, and interpreted follow-up tests with Bonferroni adjustments.

The multivariate results were striking. Students from the two school contexts differed significantly on the combined outcomes of self-regulation and altruistic behavior, with Pillai’s Trace = 0.534, F(2, 97) = 55.494, p < .001, and a partial eta-squared of 0.534. Follow-up univariate analyses showed that the SEL-oriented school’s students reported substantially higher self-regulation, F(1, 98) = 111.489, p < .001, partial eta-squared = 0.532, and higher altruistic behavior, F(1, 98) = 38.928, p < .001, partial eta-squared = 0.284. The descriptive gap extended to SEL experiences themselves: students at the SEL-oriented school reported a mean SEL score of 53.72 out of a possible 60, compared with 43.04 at the comparison school.

Self-regulation, as operationalized in the study, drew on Zimmerman’s framework and encompassed seven indicators: the ability to calm oneself when facing learning difficulties, controlling behavior during lessons, complying with class rules, maintaining focus, evaluating one’s own work, recognizing mistakes, and persevering through academic obstacles. The 15-item scale showed high internal consistency in a pilot sample of 33 students excluded from the main study, yielding Cronbach’s alpha of 0.894. The altruistic behavior instrument, based on Baron and Byrne’s conceptualization, captured six indicators including helping friends without being asked, sharing, showing empathy, cooperating, and helping without expecting praise or reward; its 14 items yielded alpha of 0.861, while the 15-item SEL scale reached 0.868.

The authors are careful to frame the association in culturally grounded terms. The Love-Based Curriculum organizes Islamic character education around pillars such as Cinta Sesama (love for others), Cinta Bangsa (love for the nation), and Cinta Diri Sendiri (self-love), which emphasize empathy, social responsibility, cooperation, and personal discipline. The researchers suggest that the larger gap in self-regulation scores may align with the self-love pillar and with the Islamic concept of tazkiyatun nafs, or self-purification, which stresses inner discipline and moral integrity. Similarly, the elevated altruism scores may be consistent with the curriculum’s explicit emphasis on caring for others, though the study did not measure whether these values had actually been internalized or manifested in observable behavior.

From a theoretical standpoint, the findings fit within a broader literature linking SEL programs to positive social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes, as well as recent meta-analytic evidence of favorable contributions of SEL interventions to prosocial development. The authors propose a plausible, though unmeasured, mechanism: SEL-oriented practices may give students repeated opportunities for perspective-taking, cooperative activities, and emotionally supportive interactions, which in turn exercise the self-monitoring and self-control skills at the heart of self-regulation. The ethics of care perspective adds a relational layer, suggesting that caring teacher-student relationships create a psychologically safe environment in which values such as empathy and responsibility are more likely to take root.

Yet the study comes with substantial caveats that the authors detail candidly. Because only one school represented each condition, school-level SEL implementation status was completely confounded with school identity, meaning the large effect sizes cannot be read as evidence that SEL alone explained 53.4 percent of the variance in outcomes. Differences in school climate, leadership, teacher practices, student composition, or implementation processes could all have contributed. The design also lacked random assignment, baseline measurements, and longitudinal follow-up, so no causal claims are possible, and the cross-sectional data cannot reveal whether the differences existed before the current educational conditions. Implementation fidelity was characterized through school documentation and limited observations rather than standardized, repeated assessment, so the consistency and intensity of SEL delivery across classrooms remains unknown.

A further limitation lies in the reliance on student self-report. Young respondents’ comprehension, response tendencies, and desire to give socially desirable answers may all have shaped their questionnaire responses, and self-reported altruistic behavior in particular should not be taken as direct evidence of observed prosocial acts. The researchers did not directly measure collectivist cultural orientations, so any link between Indonesian relational norms and the observed differences remains a hypothesis for future comparative work rather than an established explanation. The sample, limited to two public Islamic primary schools in one suburban area near Jakarta, is best treated as exploratory and context-specific.

Even with those constraints, the study makes a meaningful contribution by demonstrating how the CASEL framework, an international standard for social-emotional learning, can be situated within a locally rooted moral and spiritual educational tradition. The consistent pattern of differences across SEL experience, self-regulation, and altruistic behavior suggests that value-based environments integrating structured socio-emotional practices merit closer scientific attention. The authors call for future research incorporating multiple schools per condition, longitudinal designs, rigorous fidelity measures, and behavioral observations from teachers, parents, and peers, which together could determine whether the substantial differences observed in Ciputat can be replicated and, ultimately, attributed to SEL-oriented practices themselves.

Subject of Research: Association between school-level social-emotional learning implementation and student self-regulation and altruistic behavior within Indonesia's Love-Based Curriculum

Article Title: Social Emotional Learning associated with student self regulation and altruistic behavior in a love based curriculum

Article References: Masyithoh, S., Zaharah, Z., Latip, A. E., Wafiqni, N., Loukam, A. A., Zahria, R., & Zelda, R. (2026). Social Emotional Learning associated with student self regulation and altruistic behavior in a love based curriculum. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02293-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02293-0

Keywords: social-emotional learning, self-regulation, altruistic behavior, Love-Based Curriculum, Islamic primary education, Indonesia, CASEL framework, MANOVA, prosocial behavior, madrasah, character education, ex post facto study