Measuring Student Social Emotional Growth

This week’s article summary from NPR is To Measure What Tests Can't, Some Schools Turn to Surveys and it is a follow-up to the a summary a few weeks ago about the importance of fostering emotional intelligence in students. 

The article below is how some schools—particularly large public school districts—are efforting to assess student social-emotional development.

While built into the DNA of independent-private schools is a deep commitment to developing students cognitively and social-emotionally, most never tried to formalize exactly what Emotional Intelligence (EI) is or what specific skills and habits are most important for student success and happiness. 

Certainly the recent work and research of Carol Dweck, Paul Tough, and Angela Duckworth on growth mindset, grit, and perseverance have brought social-emotional skills and habits to the forefront of schools, and even independent-private ones are now looking at howe to measure and assess them. 

There are myriad challenges to assessing social-emotional skills and habits, yet clearly as more schools emphasize social-emotional growth, EI will become more and more prevalent in progress reports and other assessments, like personal reflection/self-evaluation.

Joe

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A growing number of schools have begun using surveys to measure important social and emotional goals for schools and students — qualities like grit, growth mindset, and student engagement.

A group of districts in California is getting ready to incorporate this kind of survey data into their accountability systems this spring. 

These districts drew up a School Quality Improvement System that relied 60% on traditional academics, and 40% on "social-emotional and culture-climate" factors.

Researchers are becoming increasingly convinced that students' attitudes about learning, their ability to control themselves, and persevere and their proficiency in working well with others account for more than half the picture of their long-term success.

They created a framework with four attributes:

• Growth mindset: the belief that working hard and persisting will help you improve at anything, and that abilities are not fixed at birth
• Self-efficacy: sense of confidence that you are capable of achieving what you set out to do
• Self-management: productive habits such as organization and delaying gratification.
• Social awareness: ability to work in a diverse group, to recognize sources of support, and to have empathy for others

Recent research shows that the student surveys, combined with teacher reports, can meaningfully predict outcomes such as GPA, test scores, attendance and suspensions.

Other schools believe these non-academic qualities are important, and they are looking for ways to track their progress.