Inspire

Design Challenge Winner: Failing Forward: How a Flawed Assessment Inspired a Bold and Innovative New Approach

By: Nicole Ramos, M.Ed. (NERDi Consulting) and Stacie R. Furia, Ph.D. (NERDi Consulting)   BUILD is a non-profit organization that uses entrepreneurship and experiential education to propel students through high school to college and career success.  BUILD believes that its outstanding success in helping low-income youth of color enroll and persist in college is due to mentorship, entrepreneurship, and the development of Spark Skills.* (A set of 6 skills educators might find familiar – Communication, Collaboration, Problem Solving, Innovation, Grit and Self-Management.) BUILD set out to create an assessment to help prove and improve impact on students’ Spark Skills growth. Like many of BUILD’s peers, the first attempt at an assessment included a pre-test/post-test, self-perception questionnaire with items largely adapted…

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Design Challenge Winner: Measuring Social Reasoning in Children

Design challenge excerpt
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A 360 degree Approach to Measuring SEL in Early Childhood Products

By Sally D. Lo, Research and Education Manager at Peppy Pals, sally@peppypals.com   With a growing industry of game-based learning solutions for early childhood education, a call for educational technology (EdTech) solutions with Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) focus has arised. However, SEL is a concept with a connotation of being “fluffy” and “difficult to measure”.  Despite extensive review (Goodman, Joshi, Nasim & Tyler, 2015) on the many benefits of teaching young children SEL, all studies are observational, and causality is not established (it has not been experimentally tested). Hence, EdTechs with a SEL focus face the challenge of finding a balance between meeting the child on their level, engaging and educating them, while at the same time producing a valid product…

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Design Challenge Winner: Democracy Prep Public Schools

By: Miguel Rivera Rios, Democracy Prep Public School   Social emotional learning (SEL) is essential for a student’s success both in school and out of school, which is why most schools provide students and families with a set of core social emotional values that are meant to provide students with guidance on cultural expectations. Although these values are integral to a school’s mission, they are often times very difficult to directly measure/quantify and most of the effective strategies are aimed only at elementary-school-aged children (Domitrovich et al 2017). In particular, schools usually struggle with understanding how students are a) developing in these values and b) transferring these values or skills outside of the classroom. At best, schools use survey-like tools…

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Design Challenge Winner: The SRASEC

By: Ryan Kettler   My colleagues (Drs. Kelly A. Feeney-Kettler and Leah Dembitzer) and I propose a measure of social-emotional competence based on selected-response items. The Selected Response Assessment of Social Emotional Competence (SRASEC) will be computer administered in a game-like format and will be appropriate for elementary school students in kindergarten through fifth grade. As a direct assessment, the measure will indicate students’ knowledge of social-emotional competence, yielding key information about specific areas needing further development to support positive student outcomes.   The SRASEC, Social-Emotional Competence, and Achievement   Measures of social-emotional competence and student achievement have historically been difficult to compare in part because they have been based on different methodologies (i.e., rating scales and observations for social-emotional…

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