Social-emotional learning – aimed at fostering a wide assortment of soft skills from empathy and listening to anger management and goal-setting – has been one of the hottest trends in education over the past decade, and more recently, a new flashpoint in the culture wars. Moms for Liberty, a conservative group, advises parents to oppose it, while advocates on the left say it should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training.

Alongside the politics, there’s a genuine debate over whether these programs – often abbreviated as SEL and sold to thousands of schools around the country – actually help students.

For years, advocates have claimed that research evidence supports social-emotional learning, citing hundreds of studies that find SEL instruction improves both academic achievement and student well-being. One of the most influential papers is a 2011 meta-analysis that reviewed more than 200 studies on SEL programs in schools and concluded that academic performance jumped 11 percentile points. That study has been cited more than 11,000 times, according to Google Scholar. But that research is old, including studies conducted only through 2007.

Read the full article about social-emotional learning by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.