Abstract / Summary
Abstract Social and emotional skills (SES) are essential to adolescents’ holistic development and are closely related to their learning, well-being, and social adjustment. However, the relative importance of different predictors of SES and the extent to which these predictive patterns vary across cultural contexts remain insufficiently understood. This study examined key predictors of SES among Chinese and international students using data from the OECD 2023 Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES). The study analyzed 46,973 fifteen-year-old students, including 5,843 students from Jinan, China, and 41,129 students from 13 other participating countries. Five machine learning algorithms were compared, with CatBoost identified as the optimal predictive model, and SHAP analysis was used to quantify predictor importance and examine nonlinear relationships. Student-perceived experiences emerged as the dominant predictors of SES across both samples. Student engagement, school belonging, teacher–student relationships, and emotion-related factors together together accounted for 88.4% and 84.7% of the total mean absolute SHAP importance in the Chinese and international samples, whereas teacher-level variables showed limited independent predictive contributions. School belonging and teacher–student relationships exhibited threshold effects, with higher activation thresholds observed among Chinese students. In contrast, student engagement demonstrated a stable positive association with SES across the two samples. These findings indicate that adolescents’ perceptions of their everyday school experiences may play a more prominent role in explaining SES than teacher-level characteristics alone. The results further demonstrate culturally differentiated predictive patterns, suggesting that the factors associated with SES may operate differently across educational contexts. The findings provide evidence for strengthening student-centered school environments and developing targeted strategies to support adolescents’ social and emotional development.