Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Despite an emerging consensus on the importance of promoting SEL in schools, reaching consensus about how best to measure SEL and determine whether valid inferences about school and teacher quality can be made based on these measures, poses three formidable conceptual and practical challenges. First, many of these skills— including collaboration, communication, and self-regulated learning—are not amenable to familiar, efficient testing approaches, such as multiple-choice testing, that are traditionally used for measuring academic achievement. As a result, there is a systematic lack of access to simple, efficient, high-quality measures that often hinders efforts to promote these higher-order skills. Second, while existing SEL measures are prolific (Coryn, Spybrook, Evergreen & Blinkiewicz, 2009; Soland et al., 2014), these measures exist in various states of development, and few are widely known among educators and state or central office leaders. Third, little information about the suitability of these measures for use in educational contexts—particularly in the context of evaluation and feedback systems—exists, and the research information that does exist is not easily accessible to practitioners. It is difficult—if not impossible—for policymakers and educators to appraise the validity, reliability, and comparability of SEL indicators for inferences about student or school improvement.

One way to address some of these conceptual and practical challenges is to establish a database of SEL measures that includes both descriptive information about the measures and available assessment materials. There is currently no system that meets the needs of educational practitioners and researchers to identify SEL measures appropriate for use with K-12 students (Yuan, Stecher and Hamilton, 2015).

This presentation describes a recent attempt to create a curated, web-based repository of publicly available SEL measures and associated descriptive and evaluative information. We summarize the range of measures available, their features, and the evidence of technical quality that is available to support their use in various education contexts. We discuss what we have learned from interactions with users about the types of information they search for and the kinds of displays that are likely to facilitate effective use, and we present the framework that we created to structure the review of information. The presentation also explores the potential benefits and pitfalls of making SEL assessments more widely available and presents implications for future research and policy.

This web-based repository has the potential to benefit three distinct user groups. For practitioners, the repository will be a place to go to explore what measures are available, and find out key information about what they are designed to measure, how they operate, what demands they place on students and teachers, and what kinds of uses their scores support. For researchers, the repository will be a place to identify measures—both operational and under development—related to a given construct, quickly scan the evidence about their reliability and validity, and contact the developers for more information. For policy makers, the repository offers a source of information to see whether measures exist to support various policy options.