Archives

By: Dale A. Blyth (blyth004@umn.edu)   Our efforts here at the Measuring SEL website have been going on in one form or another for almost 2 and a half years now, and we hope you are finding our blogs, briefs, and and guides helpful in your daily work and enrich your conversations. We now have over 2600 members in our Collaborator Network who get weekly emails about the latest blog and related items and resources. In order to continue to Inform, Inspire, Engage, and Connect with all of you, today I want to say a little about challenges, changes, and contributions.   CHALLENGES In the rapidly growing movement that SEL has become it is challenging to stay on top of what […]

By: Lindsay Read and Jordan Trejo, CASEL Greetings Collaborator Network members! We are proud to share a reflection on our accomplishments this year. We are grateful to you, our collaborator network, for your continued engagement in our work and for the input many of you have shared that has influenced the direction of our work. This group of collaborators has more than doubled this year, from 1,149 members to 2,543 as of this post with people from all 50 states and over 26 countries. This has allowed us to reach more of you who are interested in and challenged by using SEL frameworks and assessments. We began 2018 with a goal to engage more practitioners in our work. We sought […]

By: Jennifer Miller, Shannon Wanless, and Roger Weissberg Parents, teachers, and other influential adults agree that social and emotional learning is essential for children’s growth and indeed success today and for their future. Although they agree on the importance, they can run into challenges when attempting to work together to assess and support these skills. The purpose and role of social and emotional learning (SEL) assessments are particularly important because the very act of assessing can help parents and teachers learn how to best scaffold children’s learning as they move forward in their development. When educators and parents learn from one another about how social and emotional skills are visible and promoted in their various contexts (home, school, community), they can […]

By: Dale A. Blyth, Consultant   Earlier this year we asked members of the ever-growing Collaborator Network (join here) to do a survey about what frameworks they know about and use as well as the ways they use them. Over 200 of you responded and here is what you told us (while this, of course, is not a representative random sample, we believe it is helpful).   Of the 32 frameworks we explicitly asked about, only six were known by a majority of responders – Emotional Intelligence, the CASEL 5, Habits of Mind, KIPP’s 7 Character Strengths, the Partnership for 21st Century’s 21st Century Learning Skills, and the Department of Education’s Employability Skills. For each of the other 26 frameworks a […]

by: Clark McKown, Rush University Medical Center and Jeremy Taylor, CASEL   The March 2018 special issue of Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology on social-emotional skill assessment to guide educational practice. The special issue, co-edited by Assessment Work Group (AWG) steering committee members Clark McKown and Jeremy Taylor, includes 10 articles describing innovative methods of assessing children’s social-emotional learning, and innovative ways to use assessment data to guide educational practice. They conceived of this special issue as an opportunity to bring attention to promising strategies for assessing SEL and to the many ways SEL assessments can and increasingly are being used to advance educational practice. The special issue articles describe SEL assessments that are in use in the field now […]

Practitioners Sought for New Opportunity National Practitioners Advisory Group on Using Data to Inspire SEL Practice Apply HERE by April 25th, 2018 Deadline   We are looking for 20 practice leaders — educational practitioners from many different levels — who want to use their experience and wisdom to help improve the way data is used to inspire SEL practice and improve the social and emotional learning of children and youth.  We hope you can help us find just such people for the new National Practitioners Advisory Group on Using Data to Inspire SEL Practice (NPAG) to be launched this summer. The NPAG is being formed to engage practice leaders and more fully ground the work and products of a national […]

by Clark McKown, xSEL Labs   This week, the Assessment Work Group launched a competition for direct assessments of student social and emotional learning. Direct assessments, such as naturalistic technology-enhanced simulations, performance tasks, game-based data, and live structured social simulations, are a promising approach to measuring students’ social and emotional skills. They are well-suited to measuring dimensions of social and emotional learning that are not easily observed, such as the thinking skills required to understand what people are thinking and feeling. Yet there are few direct assessments on the market and many have not yet been used at scale in educational settings.   The 2nd Annual Design Challenge is re-imagined from the first Design Challenge, using lessons learned and a […]

By: Dale A. Blyth, Consultant and Deborah Moroney, American Institutes for Research Practitioner voice has not been elevated adequately in the conversation about SEL assessment.  Why is this so? The world of assessment, SEL and otherwise, comes mostly from academics, measure developers, and users in research, (or recovering applied academics like ourselves) but assessments are used (and rightly challenged) by practitioners. Who are we talking about here? The people working daily with children and youth: Educators, out-of-school time professionals, student support specialists, and educational leaders in schools, districts and programs. As the Assessment Work Group (AWG) seeks to move forward on our three goals of 1) understanding the value of different frameworks, 2) developing a practical guide to assessment, and 3) […]

Invitation to Practitioners: We need YOU! We are working hard to create a guide that can help practitioners select useful social and emotional learning assessments. But we are not practitioners and need your help.  The Practical Assessment Guide is designed to help clarify different purposes of assessment and discuss whether specific tools are useful in these ways as well as show how practitioners are already using them in real life settings.  We plan to release the online Guide in January. Currently, we have a basic beta version of how one measure page would look and how the site will operate when a person tries to use it to evaluate a potential assessment. What we need are people to go to […]