The SEL Assessment Guide turns 6-months old. What are we learning?

It’s been almost six months since our SEL Assessment Guide launched and we are very excited about our success with engaging users and impacting practice. In this week’s blog, we’ll share what we are learning about how many users we are reaching, who our users are, and what they are saying about their experience with the Guide.

• Since we launched in November, our SEL Assessment Guide has seen more than 14,000 users, coming from all fifty US states and 68 countries.
• The majority of users coming to the site (57% of users) identify as a practitioner working in a school or district, which is encouraging, since that was our target audience.

Insights from User Behavior

Thanks to the magic of Google Analytics, we might learn some useful things by exploring what users search for and what filters they use in the Guide’s measure catalog. For example, these data tell us that student self-report (37% of users) is the most frequently sought after type of measure, followed by teacher/staff report (30% of users), performance measure (19% of users), and then family and peer report (each less than 10% of users).

These data also tell us that users are searching for assessments for elementary-aged students (54% of users) far more than middle (21%) or high school (25%) students. This is not surprising, since the field is less developed at the secondary level, both from a programmatic and assessment standpoint.

Another interesting trend in the data: the top four most frequently searched SEL competencies, as well as seven of the top ten, are focused on the “self,” rather than the social aspect of SEL.

1. self-awareness
2. self-management
3. self-control
4. self-regulation
5. social-awareness
6. empathy
7. self-efficacy
8. relationship-skills
9. growth-mindset
10. responsible-decision-making

Satisfaction and Impact

Upon registering to use the Guide, approximately 70% of users give us consent to follow-up with them for feedback about the Guide (*which we greatly appreciate*). A feedback survey is subsequently sent two weeks later to users that provide consent, to which more than 200 users have responded.

From these data, we’ve learned…

• Almost 84% of users would recommend the Guide to a colleague after having used it.
• Approximately 20% of users have adopted an SEL measure since using the Guide.
• Similar percentage of users would recommend and have adopted a measure, regardless of their role (practitioner, researcher… etc).

Next Steps

Based on these data…

1. We might consider writing more about the importance of assessing both intrapersonal (self) and interpersonal competencies in students, since there seems to be a heavy focus on the former.
2. We might explore further whether users are thoughtfully matching the type of assessment with the developmental level of kids and the purposes of assessment.
3. We might add questions to our feedback survey or follow-up with users to explore whether likelihood to adopt a measure is linked to the purpose for which users are using the guide or the kind of measure being searched for.
4. Qualitative follow-up data could help us understand the value users are seeing in the guide, despite not necessary adopting a measure, given the gap between the rate of satisfaction and rate of adopting a measure.