Reasoning Model and Moral Simulation to Improve Students’ Social Skills: A Focused Look at Emotional Intelligence

Education serves the purpose of cultivating the capacity to shape character and civilisation in a dignified manner to advance the nation's intellectual life. Social studies education is an affective domain subject because it teaches students to see knowledge in social interactions and to apply it directly in the community environment. This study compares students' social skills acquired through moral reasoning-based cooperative learning to those acquired through simulation-based cooperative learning in order to determine the effectiveness of simulation-based and moral reasoning-based cooperative learning in improving students' social skills, as well as the interaction between the two. This research employed a quasi-experimental design with a comparative approach. The study was conducted in classes VIII A and VIII B, with 27 students and 26 students, respectively, at SMP N 27 Pesawaran, Lampung Province, Indonesia. The findings of this study indicate a significant difference in social skills between students taught using the Moral Reasoning cooperative learning model and students taught using the Simulation cooperative learning model in social studies subjects. Learning that employs the Moral Reasoning learning model is more effective than learning that employs the Simulation one. Received: 2 September 2021 / Accepted: 5 December 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022