Benefits of SEL » Meta-analysis

Project Description
Results Summary
Research Findings and Reports
  School-based interventions
  After-school programs
  Family programs

Project Description
With funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation, CASEL President Roger Weissberg and Joseph Durlak, professor of clinical psychology at Loyola University Chicago, have conducted a meta-analysis of more than 700 positive youth development, SEL, character education, and prevention interventions. This is the largest, most scientifically rigorous, and up-to-date review of controlled outcome research on interventions that promote children’s social and emotional development to date. The sample includes school, family, and community interventions designed to promote personal and social skills in children and adolescents between the ages of 5 and 18. Because programs varied in their goals and procedures, the large study sample was divided into three main areas: (a) school-based interventions that promote social and emotional learning (SEL), (b) after-school programs, and (c) programs for families.

Results Summary
Meta-analytic procedures were used to assess the magnitude of the impact of interventions, and results provided strong empirical support for the value of the social-emotional development programs. Interventions in all three areas were effective and tended to yield multiple benefits for their youthful participants that included gains in personal and social skills, and reductions in problem behaviors. In two of these research areas: school-based programs and after-school programs also produced significant improvement in academic achievement.

The finding in the after-school and school based reviews that interventions promoting personal and social skills also result in positive changes in academic achievement confirms the empirical connection between these two important dimensions of adjustment. Promoting young people’s personal and social skills can be a way to also enhance their academic performance. This message should find a receptive audience among educators and coordinators of after-school programs who feel pressure to attend to youths’ academic development and may feel that other programming is unrelated to such a focus. To the contrary, our findings suggest that social-emotional development programs can make an important contribution toward enhancing young people’s development in multiple ways, including their school performance.

Collectively, these findings provide strong justification for continued research, practice, and policies that foster social-emotional development for school-age populations. These interventions can improve the quality of life for young people and help prepare them to become responsible and contributing members of society.

Research Findings & Reports

School-based SEL interventions:
Reports and presentations:

Research findings:
Universal school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programs yield benefits in three major areas: feelings and attitudes, indicators of behavioral adjustment, and school achievement. More specifically, youth show improvement in social and emotional skills, school bonding, prosocial norms, self-perceptions, positive social behaviors, and academic achievement and significant reductions occur in such areas as conduct problems, substance use, and internalizing symptoms. The gains produced by school-based programs translates into a(n):

  • 23% improvement in social and emotional skills
  • 9% improvement in attitudes about self, others, and school
  • 9% improvement in school and classroom behavior
  • 9% decrease in conduct problems such as classroom misbehavior and aggression
  • 10% decrease in emotional distress such as anxiety and depression
  • 11 percentile point gain in achievement test scores

These positive results do not come at the expense of performance in core academic skills, but rather enhance academic achievement. Moreover, among those studies that collected follow-up data in each of the above categories, the positive benefits to students were found to persist over time. Most schools would welcome interventions that could modify such important outcomes. As a relative comparison, with respect to academic improvement, the impact of SEL programs is almost twice as large as that achieved through class-size reductions. Overall, school-based SEL programs lead to several meaningful, practical changes in youth’s lives.

Among other key findings:

  • In contrast to programs conducted by researchers, classroom programs conducted by teachers were effective in each of the six outcome areas. The clear implication is that SEL programs can become a part of routine school practice; they do not have to be conducted by personnel from outside the school to achieve good results.
  • Program implementation had a strong influence on outcomes. When a program is not well-executed, the chances of it benefiting students are greatly diminished.

After-school programs:
Reports:

Research findings:
In their review of 73 after-school programs explicitly designed, at least in part, to enhance students’ personal and social skills, the research team found:

1. Youth who participate in such after-school programs improve significantly in three major areas: feelings and attitudes, indicators of behavioral adjustment, and school performance. More specifically, programs were successful in improving:

  • youths’ feelings of self-confidence and self-esteem
  • school bonding (positive feelings and attitudes toward school)
  • positive social behaviors
  • school grades
  • achievement test scores

They were also successful in reducing problem behaviors (e.g., aggression, noncompliance, conduct problems) and drug use. In sum, after-school programs produced multiple benefits that pertain to youths’ personal, social, and academic life.

2. Effective programs that were consistently successful in producing multiple benefits for youth used evidence-based skill training approaches. Programs that did not use such procedures were not successful in any outcome area.

Evidence-based approaches are sequenced, active, focused, and explicit (S.A.F.E.):

S: use a sequenced set of activities to achieve skill objectives
A: use active forms of learning
F: include at least one program component focused on developing personal or social skills
E: target specific personal or social skills

Programs included in this study can be found in Appendix B of the full report. More information about many of the programs in this analysis can be found on the Harvard Family Research Project Web site..

Family programs:
Universal interventions for families are also effective. Some interventions attempt to change parenting practices in order to promote youth development while others target changes in the general family environment. Both types of interventions are effective. Overall, universal family programs significantly increase positive outcomes for youth and significantly reduce negative outcomes. These outcomes roughly correspond to the above-mentioned general categories of feelings and attitudes and indicators of behavioral adjustment as assessed in the reviews of after-school and school-based interventions, although not enough family interventions have evaluated gains in academic achievement to reach any conclusions about that particular outcome.

The research report on family interventions is currently in preparation, and will be posted here when available.

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