Reinterpreting Affective Domain Research in Mathematics Education through the Lens of Social and Emotional Learning: Implications for Research and Practice

This study reinterprets Korean mathematics education research on the affective domain through the lens of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) to identify the strengths, imbalances, and gaps of the domestic research landscape and to suggest directions for future research and educational practice.Using the Research Information Sharing Service (RISS), studies published from 2015 to 2025 were systematically screened and mapped according to the five core competencies of the CASEL framework.Of 1,265 records initially identified, 401 domestic journal articles and theses met the inclusion criteria and were classified according to each study's primary focus.To enhance coding reliability, two researchers independently coded a random sample of 50 studies; agreement was obtained for 48 studies (96.0%), with Cohen's κ = .95.The analysis showed that self-awareness dominated the literature (243 studies, 60.6%), followed by self-management (77, 19.2%), responsible decision-making (42, 10.5%), social awareness (28, 7.0%), and relationship skills (11, 2.7%).Intrapersonal competencies accounted for 79.8% of the studies, whereas social awareness and relationship skills together accounted for only 9.7%, indicating a marked imbalance toward individual psychological variables.This imbalance persisted in the yearly trend analysis for 2015-2024.As the core implication derived directly from these results, the study calls for expanding research on social awareness and relationship skills and for integrated research designs that address intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies together.Building on these results, it further proposes, as practical tasks, developing and validating mathematics-specific SEL intervention programs, extending responsible decision-making research to authentic learning choices, and examining mathematics teachers' SEL competence.