We know from both research and practice that measuring social-emotional competencies is an important part of promoting social-emotional learning. For a long time, social and emotional skills were seen as less tangible than academic skills and, therefore, viewed as something that couldn’t be accurately measured.
After decades of research and collaboration between educators, psychologists, psychometricians, and other practitioners, we now know that social-emotional competencies can be reliably assessed. Let's explore common strategies for measuring Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and the pros and cons when implementing SEL surveys, assessments, and screeners.
How to Measure SEL Highlights |
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Surveys are questionnaires that students, teachers, and other school staff can complete to share their feelings, attitudes, and experiences related to their social-emotional skills and the social-emotional climate of their learning environments. Questions on a survey can be open-ended or ask the respondent to answer using a specified rating scale. Examples of student perceptions and school climate surveys can be found online, but schools can also develop their own surveys if they have specific questions or topics they want feedback on.
The advantage of using a survey to assess social-emotional learning is that it can give students and teachers a way to express their feelings, perceptions, and experiences. Schools can also get feedback on particular social-emotional programs and curricula being used. One of the major drawbacks of SEL surveys is that it can be difficult to interpret the results, and sometimes more qualitative data analysis skills are required. Most surveys cannot be used to reliably track changes over time or understand the specific social-emotional needs of students. Nevertheless, surveys can provide important information and feedback for educators and administrators when making decisions regarding their SEL programs and practices.
An SEL assessment measures the social-emotional competencies of individuals and groups of students. Assessments typically provide a quantitative score or result, which can be used to compare individual or group students. Having this type of quantitative data also means educators can calculate the average scores across groups, as well as the variation, and use that data to track changes over time. However, these analytic approaches should only be used when working with assessments with evidence of reliability and validity. This means research has been conducted in the evaluation, showing that it truly measures the social-emotional skill(s) it claims to, and it is not measuring something else. These types of studies involve having large numbers of students answer many assessment questions at different time points to ensure consistency in responses, as well as collecting other pieces of information and data from the same students to compare their results to external criteria. SEL assessments can also be completed by different responders and through different approaches, which are outlined below.
Many student SEL assessments do not involve students at all. Instead, classroom teachers report on their students’ social-emotional skills. Research shows teachers' reports of their students’ social skills can predict critical long-term outcomes. This is likely because they see students in highly social contexts, and also work with many students over the years, and thus have a good sense of what is normative and what is not. Nevertheless, teacher-reported assessments can still contain a degree of subjectivity and bias.
To reduce issues related to rater bias, teachers must spend a good amount of time with their students (typically around 4 weeks) before they complete an assessment. Usually, some training is also involved to ensure teachers understand the assessment and how it will be used. Teacher-reported assessments can also be time-consuming for staff to complete. Therefore, schools must ensure teachers have adequate time and resources to complete the assessments, and a plan is in place for using the results so that the process is worthwhile.
Having parents complete an SEL assessment for their child can also be a good option and opportunity to learn more about students’ social-emotional skills outside the school and classroom. The results can help teachers understand if specific aspects of the classroom could trigger social and emotional difficulties.
There is much less control when sending SEL assessments to parents, because schools often cannot verify who completed the assessment and when it was completed. Teachers and administrators can also do much work to get parents to fill out these assessments, but it might not be realistic or feasible for use across an entire school or grade level. However, parent reports can still be valuable when conducting more in-depth diagnostic assessments related to SEL for individual students. It can also be a useful tool to further engage parents and caregivers in their child’s SEL progress, as well as to make them more aware of the social-emotional skills they can teach and promote within the home.
Some SEL assessments are designed for student self-report, allowing students to reflect on their own social-emotional competencies and sense of well-being. These assessments use language tailored for student comprehension and often mirror the structure of teacher or parent reports. However, younger students—particularly those below 3rd grade—may struggle with reliably responding in this format due to developmental and reading comprehension challenges.
To support accuracy, many student-facing assessments require teachers to read questions aloud, and translated versions should be provided for English Language Learners. While self-report tools are best suited for older students, they can offer valuable insights into how students view their own strengths and areas needing support. This perspective can serve as a helpful starting point for planning targeted interventions.
One example of a student-facing SEL assessment for upper elementary and secondary students is the Social Emotional Competency Assessment (SECA), which measures a broad set of SEL skills.
A direct SEL assessment is one where students complete a set of tasks or engage with an interactive game or program that can be used to measure different social and emotional skills. Students do not answer questions about their social-emotional skills, but how students respond to the tasks is an indicator of social-emotional competencies. One well-known example of a direct assessment of self-control is the marshmallow test. Similar tasks can be used with younger children to measure competencies such as self-regulation and executive functioning. Recently, technology-based social-emotional assessments have been introduced as a more direct and less biased way to measure certain social-emotional skills. For example, students completing these assessments could be provided with some kind of social problem that they need to resolve, or shown a series of faces and asked to interpret the emotion shown. This approach to measuring students’ social-emotional skills is a growing area in both research and practice. However, schools may find it challenging to administer it on a large scale. Although these types of assessments may still be somewhat limited, this area of SEL will continue to grow and develop in the years to come.
All educators engaging in SEL assessment should know the key differences between social-emotional assessments and screeners. A screener is a type of assessment that can be used to identify students who need additional support. All screeners are assessments, but not all assessments are screeners. Screener results go beyond telling us if a student is low or high in their social-emotional skills by using research-based cut-points to determine if the students’ skills are lower than what is typical or normative. These cut-points are usually determined through large studies where nationally representative samples of students complete them as well as rigorous research to track students over time and see which scores are predictive of certain outcomes. A reliable and valid screener will tell us with a high degree of accuracy and certainty that students who score within a certain range need support, and if they do not receive support, they are at risk for more adverse outcomes.
Of course, not all screeners are perfect, and there is always some degree of error. Some social-emotional screeners may favor sensitivity over specificity, or vice versa. This will impact the number of false positives (i.e., students falsely identified as needing SEL support) you get in your sample compared to the false negatives (i.e., students falsely identified as not needing SEL support). For example, the DESSA-mini, an evidence-based social-emotional screener, has high specificity but lower sensitivity. This means that it is unlikely that students who do not need additional SEL support will be identified as needing support; it is more likely that some students who do need SEL support will be “missed”. This decision to favor specificity over sensitivity means schools using this screener will not risk overidentifying students, especially given the limited resources available to teachers. However, they will need to be aware that a few students may not score below the identified thresholds but still require some additional support in the area of SEL.
💡Resource: The Social Emotional Learning GuideAt Branching Minds, we can integrate social-emotional data from several surveys, assessments, and screeners with our platform, so educators can use this information to guide decision-making and best practices within an MTSS framework.
We also provide all of our district partners with free access to the SECA, which is a student self-reported social-emotional assessment. Through our partnership with Aperture Education, our district partners can also have teachers complete the DESSA-mini screener and DESSA diagnostic assessment for their students directly through the Branching Minds platform and use those results to ensure all students receive the social-emotional support needed to succeed.
If you want more information about different evidence-based SEL assessments, we recommend checking out CASEL’s free assessment guide or the RAND organization’s education assessment finder.