Project Flourish

Project Flourish is a collaboration between Yale University, Trajectory of Hope, and The Urban Assembly to identify and eliminate inequity, racism, and other exclusionary practices in SEL research, programming, and policy through the use of novel SEL assessments and implementation.

In the past 20 years, interest and investment in universal school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) has increased. This movement has been backed by national education policy, including the Every Study Succeeds Act of 2015 which requires schools to measure at least one indicator of student social, emotional, and behavioral health in addition to academic benchmarks.

As indicators of school quality beyond academics have come to the forefront, two needs have emerged: evidence-based interventions and rigorous assessments that can provide sound and useful feedback on the efficacy of social and emotional learning approaches.

While many new SEL approaches and assessments emerged in the last decade to fill these needs, historically marginalized students have not shared equally in the benefits. In some cases, these interventions, practices, and policies have contributed to inequalities, inaccessibility, and punitive educational practices that adversely impact minoritized youth. A recent review of universal school-based SEL found that nearly 75 percent of studies did not even report student race in their results.

Trajectory of Hope , The Urban Assembly , and the Yale University have come together to ensure that social and emotional learning approaches, and accompanying assessment tools , promote equity and to help identify and eliminate racism and other exclusionary practices in research, in programming, and in policy.

1. Science: Explore and understand how novel SEL assessments work independently and in concert with each other when applied by organizations in schools with the stated goals of identifying and dismantling student outcome disparities, systemic biases, and/or exclusionary practices.
2. Practice: Identify how novel support ongoing and established practices of Urban Assembly and Trajectory of Hope in fostering school-wide social and emotional health. Determine what adaptations or refinements to the tools are necessary to deliver a fully accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful suite of digital assessments.
3. Policy: Provide proof of concept of tool integration with data-systems native to schools in two different models – those of Urban Assembly and Trajectory of Hope - that will help these organizations become leaders in this space and yield information to make impactful policy statements regarding the resources, services, and staffing necessary to use tools and incorporate data in decision-making.

The novel SEL assessments for schools included in this study have strong psychometric properties alongside being accessible and pragmatic. The tools intentionally incorporated diversity in stimuli, samples, and design to address exclusionary practices in research.

School Climate Walkthrough

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.

Momentary Emotion Assessment (MEA)

The MEA is a smartphone app that measures students' in-the-moment emotions and responses to those emotions across different school contexts. It is designed to help educators and researchers understand and support students' trends in emotions and emotion management. The digital tool provides individual reports for students in grades 9-12.

Student Emotion Regulation Assessment (SERA)

The SERA is a vignette-based assessment that measures students’ use of 8 emotion regulation strategies to manage anger, anxiety, boredom, and sadness across commonly occurring academic and social situations in or related to school. It is designed to help educators understand and support students’ emotion regulation at school. The digital tool provides individual reports for students in grades 6-12 and aggregated reports for educators working with grades 1-12.

Funding Source: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Principal Investigator: Cipriano