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Realizing the Promise of Adolescence

October 9, 2019 Inform

By: Nancy E. Hill, Harvard University A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth, calls for a re-thinking and re-framing of adolescence. For too long, adolescence has been viewed as a period of risk and vulnerability, rather than one of discovery, innovation, and opportunity. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience and medical imaging, we now understand that adolescence is a dynamic period of brain development, second only to infancy in terms of the speed and extent of change, and a profoundly important time for growth and learning. These changes show that the adolescent brain is particularly responsive to the developmental needs associated with this […]

Practitioners Talked; We Listened: Lessons from Building Consensus on Practical SEL Assessment

October 2, 2019 Inform

By: Elizabeth Nolan and Deborah Moroney, American Institutes for Research As the saying goes, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” As researchers, we hear this quite a bit in our hallways, and we take this statement very seriously. For many reasons, the quote is true. Without measurement, we can’t determine whether interventions, programs, practices, and policies are working. Measuring SEL, broadly, provides crucial feedback about how adults employ practices and strategies to support social and emotional learning; how youth and adults are developing social and emotional competencies; and how agencies and organizations are systematically supporting social and emotional learning and development. Here’s the caveat to our favorite adage, though: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure well.” In the […]

New Report Examines State of SEL Assessments, Calls for Greater Coordination with School Policies, Programs, and Professional Learning

A leading group of scholars, test developers, and educators has just released a landmark report that describes the evolving field of social and emotional learning (SEL) assessments and recommends steps for continued improvements. The 53-page report, Student Social and Emotional Competence Assessment: The Current State of the Field and a Vision for Its Future, was developed over the past three years by the Assessment Work Group, managed by CASEL with leaders from the RAND Corporation, Harvard University, the California CORE Districts, Transforming Education, xSEL Labs, and several universities, nonprofit organizations, and school districts across the country. Clark McKown served as the lead author. Key findings include: Social and emotional competencies can not only be taught—they can also be measured. […]

SEL Field Notes | September 20

September 20, 2019 SEL Field Notes

This newsletter is curated by the American Institutes for Research and CASEL for the MeasuringSEL Collaborator Network and aims to keep you engaged with news, research, and resources relevant to measurement and data in the field of social and emotional learning. Please let us know what you are reading, doing and seeing in the field that’s worth sharing. Tell us about it here! Measurement in Practice Edutopia: Making assessment a collaborative process How a middle school teacher turned an individual assessment into a group presentation with an authentic audience and three layers of feedback: “’I like it when we get to talk and work with each other.’ I kept reading some version of that statement over and over again in […]

Lessons in SEL from the California CORE Districts

September 18, 2019 Inform

By Thomas Toch, FutureEd Nearly a decade ago, a group of California school districts decided there was a better way to measure academic progress than relying on standardized test scores alone. The CORE Districts developed surveys that would gauge school climate and social-emotional dimensions of learning. Since 2016, they have been administered to nearly 1 million students annually. Now as educators across the nation embrace the importance of school climate and student engagement, the experience in the CORE Districts offers valuable lessons about both the benefits and challenges of using surveys to measure SEL. The survey results across the six districts identified some troubling trends that educators are working to address. African American students, for instance, feel less of a […]

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Realizing the Promise of Adolescence

Practitioners Talked; We Listened: Lessons from Building Consensus on Practical SEL Assessment

New Report Examines State of SEL Assessments, Calls for Greater Coordination with School Policies, Programs, and Professional Learning

SEL Field Notes | September 20

Lessons in SEL from the California CORE Districts

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