Chapter 10 – Social-Emotional Learning Opportunities in Online Games for Preschoolers

In recent years, social-emotional learning became one of the prime themes in educational media for preschoolers. Much of the interest is driven by research indicating that mastery of social-emotional skills is associated with greater wellbeing across various life domains. Despite large numbers of educational media claiming to promote social-emotional skills, little is known about social-emotional learning affordances of these media, and specifically of online digital games for preschoolers. In this chapter, we present the study that examined the content of 66 online games for preschoolers offered on three major networks. Specifically, we assessed the range of social-emotional skills included in the games, the level of complexity and breadth of the tasks, and the delivery methods of the learning opportunities targeting social-emotional skills. The findings reviewed in this chapter suggest that although preschoolers have opportunities to learn social-emotional skills from online games, they are exposed to a limited number of skills of similar complexity levels, and most often have to learn social-emotional skills by observation and not practice.