Giving Compass' Take:

• RAND released web-based tools and assessments to help educators measure progress on social-emotional learning instruction. However, researchers warn teachers to carefully measure SEL programs because of the limitations to these tools.

• Will social-emotional learning be able to advance student growth in the classroom? 

• Read about teaching social-emotional learning in the digital age. 

In the often-fraught debate over education policy, there is growing agreement that educators should pay close attention to the development of the social and emotional skills that allow students to persevere when working on difficult tasks, regulate emotions, and work effectively in teams.

But measuring such skills remains a significant challenge. In November, RAND released a web-based tool to help practitioners and researchers identify assessments of social-emotional learning. The RAND Education Assessment Finder provides information about roughly 200 measures of K-12 students' interpersonal (social) and intra-personal (emotional) competencies, as well as higher-order cognitive competencies such as creativity. Practitioners and researchers can explore what assessments are available, what they are designed to measure, what demands they place on students and teachers, and what kinds of uses their scores support.

But the tools have limits, and these assessments are not yet suitable for high-stakes uses in accountability systems. Even under lower-stakes conditions, the simplistic use of such assessments poses risks that researchers and practitioners should avoid.

  • First, the set of SEL assessments is limited. Although the RAND Assessment Finder contains more than 200 measures, the number of high-quality measures with solid evidence of reliability and validity is small.
  • There are fewer measures exclusively for younger students than for older students, and fewer measures of interpersonal competencies such as teamwork and social awareness than intra-personal competencies such as self-regulation or grit.
  • Users should be cautious when interpreting self-reports and teacher judgments because they can be influenced by a desire to respond in ways they believe reflect social norms, a problem testing experts call “social desirability bias.”
  • We also need to recognize that students develop SEL competencies not only through their experiences in school, but also in their homes, neighborhoods, and other environments.

Read the full article about measuring social-emotional skills by Laura S. Hamilton and Brian M. Stecher at RAND