Meta-Analysis
Project Description
With funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Mental Health, CASEL president and CEO Roger Weissberg and Joseph Durlak, professor of clinical psychology at Loyola University Chicago, have directed the meta-analyses of 213 positive youth development, SEL, character education, and prevention interventions. These are the largest, most scientifically rigorous, and up-to-date reviews of controlled outcome research on interventions that promote children’s social and emotional development to date. The reviews include school, family, and community interventions designed to promote personal and social skills in children and adolescents between the ages of 5 and 18. The reviews looked at the impact of SEL programs on students’ SEL skills, attitudes toward self and others, positive social behavior, conduct problems, emotional distress, and academic performance.
Results Summary
SEL programs have found to yield multiple benefits in every review/analysis conducted to date.
The reviews indicate that SEL programs:
- Are effective in both school and after-school settings and for students with and without behavioral and emotional problems.
- Are effective for racially and ethnically diverse students from urban, rural, and suburban settings across the K-12 grade range.
- Improve students’ social-emotional skills, attitudes about self and others, connection to school, and positive social behavior; and reduce conduct problems and emotional distress.
- Improve students’ achievement test scores by 11 percentile points.
In addition, school-based programs are most effectively conducted by school staff (e.g., teachers, student support staff) indicating that they can be incorporated into routine educational practice.
Effective programs and approaches are typically sequenced, active, focused, and explicit (S.A.F.E.), meaning they:
- 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: Explicitly target particular personal or social skills for development
The magnitude and scope of these benefits suggests that SEL programs are among the most successful youth-development programs offered to school-age youth. Given these positive findings, we recommend that federal, state, and local policies and practices encourage the broad implementation of well-designed, evidence-based SEL programs during and after school.
