Greetings Collaborator Network!

Greetings Collaborator Network!

We are thrilled at the response from our first newsletter and are committed to making this an added value to the field. As such, we encourage you to invite your friends and colleagues to join! If you know someone who may be interested in joining the Collaborator Network, please forward them this newsletter so they can Sign up here.

From the Network:
Opportunity for elementary and middle school districts to have free access to a new system for assessing children’s social reasoning skills!

Researchers at Rush NeuroBehavioral Center and SoarTech recently created VESIPTM (Virtual Environment for Social Information Processing), an easy to use, web-based, simulation-style direct assessment of children’s social reasoning skills. VESIP is designed for children in grades 3-7. We are currently inviting schools in the Chicagoland area, who would like free use of VESIP for program evaluation, to participate in a validation study this 2016-2017 academic year! We are also recruiting school districts nationwide to participate in the norming phase of this study in the 2017-2018 academic year. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Principal Investigator Nicole Russo-Pons aran, PhD at nicole_russo@rush.edu or 847-763-7927.

Key Resources:
TransformEd recently published “Expanding the Definition of Student Success: A Case Study of the CORE Districts” – a case study of how California’s CORE Districts created a groundbreaking data system tha t sees students as whole people, not just test scores. The case study provides an in-depth discussion of how social-emotional competencies – a key component of the CORE Districts’ holistic data system – were prioritized and assessed. TransformEd concludes with lessons learned about the CORE Districts’ innovative system that can inform other next-generation assessment and continuous improvement efforts, including those catalyzed by the Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Reaching out to the Network:
If you would like us to share something in an upcoming newsletter or pose a question to the network, please contact Teresa Borowski at tborowski@casel.org. Also, please feel free to send us feedback and input to make this as helpful and valuable as possible.

We look forward to collaborating with you to positively impact the future of our nation’s youth!

Best,
Teresa Borowski
Newsletter Editor
Collaborator Network for Social and Emotional Competence Assessment
Assessment Work Group to Establish Practical Social-Emotional Competence Assessments of Preschool to High School Students