SEL Assessments

Team Members: James Floman, Marc Brackett, Annette Ponnock, Hannah Asis, Chris Cipriano, Signal Barsade (Wharton) Matthew LaPalme, Peihao Luo, Alessandra Yu

This project aims to develop, validate, and publish a new measure of emotional intelligence for adults. The multi-component assessment will include tests of emotion expression recognition, understanding emotions, and regulating emotions. A second aim of this project is to measure whether the new test explains incremental variance in satisfaction with life, anxiety/depression, academic achievement, prosocial behavior, self-compassion, and peer-rated interpersonal status, among other outcomes, compared to prior measures of emotional intelligence. All study measures will be conducted in an online format and consists of standard questions and assessments pertaining to emotional awareness, personality, and self-reports. The test will treat emotional intelligence as a set of abilities. There will be three sections:

• The Subtle Multimodal Affect Recognition Test (SMART): This assessment tests the ability to perceive emotions through facial, vocal, and bodily cues and also assesses how well individuals can recognize hidden or masked emotions.
• The Emotion Understanding Test (EUT): This assessment test the ability to understand emotion language; this includes: 1) the ability to differentiate among emotion words and to use emotion language with granularity, 2) the ability to understand the root causes of emotions, and 3) the ability to understand the relationship between families of emotion words.
• The Emotion Regulation Test (ERT): This assessment is a situation judgment test (SJT) that uses a vignette-based paradigm to assess the ability to regulate emotions in the self and others. Each vignette describes a situation at work where participants are asked to think about how they would regulate their emotions or the emotions of others. This assessment is currently in development and validation and will be complete by the Summer of 2021.

Funding Source: Wend Ventures

Team Members: Marc Brackett, James Floman, Chris Cipriano, Michael Strambler (The Consultation Center at Yale), Joanna Meyer (The Consultation Center at Yale), Maegan Genovese (The Consultation Center at Yale), Annette Ponnock, Almut Zieher, Linda Torv, Hannah Asis, Alessandra Yu, Beatris Garcia</>

This project is a three-year investigation of educator emotional well-being and social and emotional learning implementation fidelity by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI) in partnership with The Consultation Center at Yale. Over the course of the project period, the project team will:

• design, validate, and make widely available a measure of educator well-being;
• design, validate, and make widely available a measure of educator social-emotional learning (SEL) program implementation fidelity (to gauge associations and potential interaction effects between SEL implementation and well-being); and
• develop an accompanying set of resources to help schools improve teacher well-being (as driven by survey results).

The combination of enhanced measurement and actionable resources will raise awareness among school leaders and policymakers about the state of teacher well-being and engagement and of steps that can be taken to improve it.

• Cipriano, C. (Chair, 2020). "The Development and Initial Validation of Four Ecologically Valid,Multi-Dimensional, and Scalable SEL Assessment Tools. Symposium to be presented at the American Educational Research Association Meeting in San Francisco, California (Cancelled due to COVID-19).
• Cipriano, C., Floman, J., Hoffmann, J., & Willner, C. (2019). Building the Assessments We Need: The Development of new actionable SEL data-points for teachers. CASEL SEL Exchange, Chicago, IL

• Brackett, M. & Cipriano, C. (2020). Teachers are Anxious and Overwhelmed: They Need SEL Now More Than Ever. Ed Surge, Published April 7, 2020
• Cipriano,C., & Brackett. M. (2020). How to Support Teachers’ Emotional Needs Right Now, Great Good Science Center. Published April 30, 2020
• Cipriano, C., Naples, L.H., & Eveleigh, A. (2020). Feeling Overwhelmed and Overlooked, Special Educators

• Hamilton, L.S. & Doss, C.J. (2020) Supports for Social and Emotional Learning in American Schools and Classrooms: Findings from the American Teacher Panel. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA397-1.html.
• Strambler, M.J., Meyer, J.L., Zieher, A.K., & Genovese, M.A. (2020). Surveying Educators about Social Emotional Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic. New Haven, CT: The Consultation Center at Yale. https://osf.io/ekr2h/
• Zieher, A. K. Cipriano, C., Meyers, J., & Strambler, M. (2021). Educators’ implementation and use of social and emotional learning early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of School Psychology, Online First

Team Members: Jessica Hoffmann, Marc Brackett, Chris Cipriano, Julie McGarry, Jennifer Seibyl, Kalee DeFrance, Sean McFarland, Elinor Hills, Rachel Baumsteiger

The School Climate Walkthrough is a web-based school climate assessment tool for secondary schools. Students complete “the Walkthrough” in two parts over the course of a typical school day - 15 minutes in the morning, answering questions about their overall opinions of their school, and 15 minutes in the afternoon, completing a checklist of their observations from that day at school. The tool offers instantaneous scoring and a digital report covering nine domains of school climate including safety, relationships, teaching quality, and respect for diversity. Results of the survey are automatically displayed once all participants submit their responses and are interpretable by the students themselves. Interactive features of the report allow users to explore overall scores as well as any areas in which various demographic groups of students may be reporting significantly disparate experiences.

The app can be used by students, educators, and leaders to start taking action towards positive change in their school communities, and school climate domains are aligned with potential project ideas and actionable steps available in the inspirED resource libraries: activities and projects.

Want to get involved? The School Climate Walkthrough team is currently recruiting schools interested in using our new survey tool. Participating schools will ask students to complete the School Climate Walkthrough, through our web-based app on a typical school day. Participating schools will receive a full school climate report and a complementary remote consultation session to support interpretation and next steps. More information on how to get started can be found here.

• Hoffmann, J. D., Baumsteiger, R., Seibyl, J., Hills, E., Bradley, C., Cipriano, C., & Brackett, M. A. (2022). Building useful, web-based educational measures for students, with students: An illustrative demonstration with The School Climate Walkthrough Tool for high schools. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice.

• Baumsteiger, R. & De France, K. (2022, July). Adolescents' affective experiences: The influence of home, school, technology, and a school-based program [Conference Symposium]. International Society for Research on Emotion Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA.
• Hoffmann, J. D., Baumsteiger, R., & Seibyl, J. (2022, April). School Climate Walkthrough measure: A validation study [Paper presentation]. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, San Diego.
• Hoffmann, J. D., Baumsteiger, R., & Seibyl, J. (August, 2021). The School Climate Walkthrough: A tool for understanding school climate in secondary schools [Poster presentation]. American Psychological Association Annual Convention, Virtual.
• Seibyl, J., Baumsteiger, R., & Hoffmann, J. (2021, August). Same School, Different Experience: Exploring Group Differences Through School Climate Profile Analyses [Poster presentation]. American Psychological Association Annual Meeting, Virtual.
• Hoffmann, J. D., Baumsteiger, R., McGarry, J., Seibyl, J., Brackett, M.A. (April, 2021). How to Create More Useful Measures: The Development of a Web-based Application for Assessing School Climate in Secondary Schools. In J. Montgomery (Chair). Innovative Approaches to Measuring Social Emotional Learning. Presentation at the American Educational Research Association annual convention.
• Hoffmann, J.D. (2019, November). The Importance of a Person-centered Approach to Measuring School Climate: Raising Every Student’s Voice. Presentation at the International Bullying Prevention Association Conference, Chicago, IL.
• Cipriano, C., Floman, J., Hoffmann, J., & Willner, C. (2019, October). Building the Assessments We Need: The Development of new actionable SEL data-points for teachers. CASEL SEL Exchange, Chicago, IL.
• Bradley, C. Hoffmann, J. D. & McGarry, J. (2019, March). A Person-Centered Approach to Measuring School Climate: Capturing Between- and Within-School Variability in Student Experiences. Poster presentation at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Washington, DC.

Team Members: Zi Jia Ng, Jessica Hoffmann, Craig Bailey, Chris Cipriano, Marc Brackett, Linda Torv, Beatris Garcia, Alexandra Harrison, Morgan Mannweiler, Cynthia Willner

This project is focused on the development and validation of the Student Emotion Regulation Assessment (SERA). The SERA is a new direct assessment that measures students’ use of various emotion regulation strategies (e.g., problem solving, emotional support-seeking, somatic relaxation, distraction, rumination, and experiencing the emotion) to deal with emotional situations that commonly occur in school. There are two versions of the SERA: the SERA-P for use with students in grades 1-5 and the SERA-S for use with students in grades 6-12. In both versions, students are presented with age-appropriate vignettes (see examples below) and asked how they would respond in these situations. Both versions are computer-based, illustrated, and narrated to enhance student engagement and accessibility.

The purpose of the SERA is to (1) enhance educators’ awareness and understanding of their students’ emotion regulation strategy use and competency; (2) increase adolescent students’ awareness of their own emotion regulation strategy use and knowledge of effective emotion regulation strategies; and (3) provide guidance to educators on how to support their students’ development of effective emotion regulation strategies in classroom settings. To meet these goals, we are conducting research to ensure that the SERA has strong psychometric quality, is feasible for schools to use, and has high utility.

• Ng, Z. J., Willner, C. J., & Mannweiler, M. D. (August 2021). The Student Emotion Regulation Assessment: A tool for measuring students' emotion regulation skills. Poster presented at the 2021 annual convention of the American Psychological Association (virtual conference).
• Mannweiler, M. D., Willner, C. J., Harrison, A. P., Ng, Z., Hoffman, J. D., Bailey, C. S., Cipriano, C., Brackett, M. A. (August 2021). Age-related differences in students’ emotion regulation strategy endorsement patterns. Poster presented at the 2021 annual convention of the American Psychological Association (virtual conference).
• Ng, Z. J., Willner, C. J., Cipriano, C., & Brackett, M. (April 2021). A review of emotion regulation assessment in schools. Poster presentation (virtual) at the 2021 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
• Mannweiler, M., Willner., C. J., Ng, Z. J., Hoffmann, J., & Brackett, M. (April 2021). Educators systematically over-predict student anxiety in response to hypothetical vignettes. Poster presentation (virtual) at the 2021 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
• Willner, C. J., Hoffmann, J. D., Bailey, C. S., Ng, Z. J., Harrison, A. P., Garcia, B., & Brackett, M. A. (April 2020). Developing an objective assessment of students' emotion regulation for use in elementary school through high school. Presentation accepted for the 2020 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA (conference canceled).
• Willner, C. J. (2019). Directly assessing students’ emotion regulation skills in elementary school through high school. Presentation at the CASEL Social & Emotional Learning Exchange 2019, Chicago, IL.

Team Members: Kalee DeFrance, Chris Cipriano, Jessica Hoffmann, Cynthia Willner, Marc Brackett, Beatris Garcia, Rachel Baumsteiger, Violet Tan

The purpose of the Momentary Emotion Assessment Tool is to track how students feel and how they respond to their emotions at school. This tool could be used by researchers and educators to understand momentary emotions and how they change, and also to capture the effects of interventions designed to improve students’ experiences at school. The tool will also provide students with individual reports and in-the-moment feedback on how to improve their emotional experiences.

Schools will receive reports of similar information, but with results aggregated across students, and with resources for supporting students. Data collected through the process of validating this tool will contribute scientific insights to how adolescents’ momentary emotions vary across time, physical setting, activity, social company, and based on their responses to their emotions. These data can also be used to evaluate how emotional experiences differ across different students.

• Baumsteiger, R., Garcia, B., Cipriano, C., Hoffmann, J. D., Willner, C. J., & Brackett, M. A. (2020, January). How do teens feel at school? New directions for assessing momentary emotional experiences. Poster presented at the Western Positive Psychology Association Conference, Claremont.
• Garcia, B., Baumsteiger, R., Hoffmann, J. D., & Brackett, M. A. (2020, April). Testing the directional influences between interpersonal relationships and emotion regulation: Support for a new approach. Poster presented at the annual Society for Affective Science Convention, San Francisco. (online)
• Hoffmann, J. D., Baumsteiger, R., Hills, E. & Brackett, M. A. (2020, April). A web-based, student-centered approach to school climate measurement. In Cipriano, C. (Chair), The development and initial validation of four ecologically valid, multidimensional, and scalable SEL assessment tools [Symposium]. American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. (conference cancelled due to COVID)
• Hoffmann, J. D., McGarry, J., & Baumsteiger, R. (2020, October). Tools for assessing and addressing adolescents’ emotional experiences at school [Workshop]. Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) Exchange, Virtual. (conference cancelled due to COVID)
• Baumsteiger, R., Willner, C., Hoffmann, J. D., Cipriano, C., Garcia, B., Tan, V., & Brackett, M. A. (2020, November). Adolescents’ emotions and emotion regulation during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Poster presented at the Yale Child Studies Center 2020 Associates Week.

• Baumsteiger, R., Garcia, B., Cipriano, C., Hoffmann, J. D., Willner, C. J., & Brackett, M. A. (under review). Assessing adolescents’ momentary emotions and emotion regulation at school: A systematic review and future directions.

Team Members: James Floman, Marc Brackett, Annette Ponnock. Alessandra Yu, Beatris Garcia, Chris Cipriano, Sigal Barsade (Wharton) & Matthew LaPalme

Project Description: This project aims to develop, validate, and publish a new measure of emotional intelligence for adults. The multi-component assessment will include tests of emotion expression recognition, understanding emotions, and regulating emotions. A second aim of this project is to measure whether the new test explains incremental variance in satisfaction with life, anxiety/depression, academic achievement, prosocial behavior, self-compassion, and peer-rated interpersonal status, among other outcomes, compared to prior measures of emotional intelligence. All study measures will be conducted in an online format and comprised of standard questions and assessments pertaining to emotional awareness, personality, and self-reports. The test will treat emotional intelligence as a set of abilities. There will be three sections:

• Emotion Perception
• Emotion Understanding
• Emotion Regulation

There will be six subsections, and approximately eight items per subsection for a total of 48 items.

Team Members: Cynthia Willner, Jessica Hoffmann, Craig Bailey, Zi-Jia Ng, Alexandra Harrison, Beatris Garcia, Chris Cipriano, & Marc Brackett

Project Description: This project aims to develop and validate new assessments of students’ emotion regulation for use by educators of 1st through 12th grade students. The assessments will provide data on the strategies students use to manage anger, anxiety, sadness, and boredom in school. These computer-based assessments ask students to report how they would likely respond to specific emotional situations in school. The assessments will provide automatic data reports for educators on the kinds of emotion regulation strategies their students use (e.g., support-seeking, distraction, avoidance, reappraisal/reframing, etc.) and the overall adaptiveness of their emotion regulation strategy choices. We will also conduct research to establish age-level benchmarks for scores on these assessments.

Team Members: Jessica Hoffmann, Marc Brackett, Chris Cipriano, Kari Olsen, Julie McGarry, Jennifer Seibyl, & Rachel Baumsteiger

Project Description: The school climate walkthrough is a project to develop a web-based digital school climate assessment tool. This app is intended to be used by secondary school students to measure their school climate and take action on making positive change in their school communities. Students use the app to answer a series of school climate survey questions at the start and end of a single school day, creating a snapshot of their school climate across the domains of safety, relationships, environment, teaching quality, and social media. Results of the survey are automatically displayed once all participants submit their responses and are interpretable by the students themselves. Repeated use of the tool allows for tracking of school climate over time.

Team Members: Kalee De France, Rachel Baumsteiger, Beatris Garcia, Chris Cipriano, Jessica Hoffmann, Cynthia Willner, & Marc Brackett

Project Description: The purpose of the Momentary Emotion Assessment Tool is to benchmark students’ momentary emotions in regular classrooms and individualized learning settings, as well as compare both settings in terms of the emotions they elicit. This project will contribute scientific insights to the search for determinants of momentary emotions at school, develop brief in-the-moment interventions helping students to cope with their emotions at school, develop technology that assesses students’ momentary emotions, and provide students and teachers in-the-moment feedback about these emotions in innovative ways.