March 8, 2024, is international SELDay! #SELDay is an international, community-driven campaign championing children’s social and emotional learning health and achievement worldwide. SEL supports students to feel their best and do their best at school, and #SELDay is a time to raise awareness and share resources to support the overall academic, social, and emotional health of all youth and adults, worldwide!
The Education Collaboratory is ringing in this year’s #SELDay by releasing a suite of artifacts sharing the latest and up and coming science of SEL from the lab!
Download the Research Brief Here
Download a Science Snapshot for Students Here
Download a Science Snapshot for Educators Here
Download a Science Snapshot for Leaders Here
Download a Science Snapshot for Policymakers Here
Download a Science Snapshot for Families Here
Here’s a sneak peek at the brief:
Do You Know SEL? Seven new studies to look out for from the Education Collaboratory at Yale
In this brief, we highlight seven new studies to be on the lookout for in 2024 that are advancing the science and practice of SEL.
1. Does SEL promote academic achievement?
While SEL programs are primarily implemented to support students' social and emotional development and well-being, new research confirms that SEL supports students’ academic success in school.
A new large scale meta-analysis led by Dr. Cheyeon Ha deeply explores and disentangles what we know now about students’ SEL experiences specific to academic achievement. The forthcoming meta-analysis of 40 experimental studies of SEL programs boasts three important findings for the field. Since SEL programs contribute to the academic achievement of K-12 students, ensuring equity in student’s opportunities to access SEL can contribute to reductions in academic achievement gaps alongside boosting all student’s overall success at school.
- K-12 students who participated in SEL programs demonstrated better academic achievement than those who did not, confirming yet again a significant positive relationship between SEL and academic achievement.
- SEL promoted improvements in student GPAs and standardized tests, and achievement test-based results generated the most precise and reliable estimates of the effects of SEL on achievement.
- Students' literacy and math achievement was significantly improved after participating in SEL programs, indicating that SEL's impact on academic achievement is not restricted to one subject.
Since SEL programs contribute to the academic achievement of K-12 students, ensuring equity in student’s opportunities to access SEL can contribute to reductions in academic achievement gaps alongside boosting all students’ overall success at school.
Ha, C., McCarthy, M., Strambler, M., Cipriano, C. (Under Review). Disentangling the Effects of Social and Emotional Learning Programs on Student Academic Achievement Across Grades 1-12: A Systematic Review and A Meta-analysis.
Check out a related study of SEL in the United States here: Cipriano, C., Ha, C., Wood, M., Sehgal, K., Ahmad, E., & McCarthy, M. (2024). A Meta-analysis of the effects of Universal School-Based SEL Programs and Marginalized Students in the United States. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy. 3(1).
2. How do students manage their emotions at school?
The prevalence of anxiety, depression, and behavioral challenges among children and adolescents aged 3-17 years in the United States have almost doubled in the past decade. Empowering children and adolescents to recognize and manage difficult emotions, and supporting their mental health in educational settings are two topline recommendations from the Office of Surgeon General in response to the child and adolescent mental health crisis.
However, discussions around how children should be taught to manage their emotions are controversial and often dangerously misleading, including the commonly used categorization of emotion regulation strategies as adaptive or maladaptive. Strategies that are often labeled by some researchers and practitioners as adaptive can be costly or ineffective. For example, Reappraisal/Reframing requires significant mental resources and can be counterproductive in situations that can and should be changed, such as the oppression of marginalized groups. In contrast, strategies that are frequently labeled as maladaptive can be helpful in certain situations or for certain people. For example, Rumination/Repetitive thinking can be helpful when the focus is constructive and for individuals who tend to bottle up or push away undesired thoughts. As there is no one-strategy-fits-all solution to emotion regulation, the development of a large or diverse repertoire of strategies in childhood and adolescence is vital as it builds the basis for flexible and adaptive regulation.
To support this growth, Dr. Ng and colleagues at Yale developed and refined the Student Emotion Regulation Assessment (SERA), a digital vignette-based assessment that measures students’ (grades 1-12) use of eight different strategies to manage their emotions at school to help educators better understand and support students’ emotion regulation development. More information can be found here.
Learn more about emotion science in school here: Ng, Z.J., Willner, C.J., Mannweiler, M.D. et al. A Systematic Review of Emotion Regulation Assessments in US Schools: Bridging the Gap Between Researchers and Educators. Educ Psychol Rev 34, 2825–2865 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648- 022-09691-4
3. What is the “how” of SEL teaching?
For SEL to be effective, we need to consider the “how” or processes of SEL alongside the “what” or content of SEL. Effective SEL requires more of students than learning factual knowledge like emotion vocabulary and developing skills like identifying and expressing how they are feeling. The entire purpose of SEL is for students to draw on their SEL in daily social interactions and emotional situations which may be charged and challenging.
With funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (R305A210262), Dr. Almut Zieher and colleagues at Yale have identified five Pedagogies of SEL that, when used strategically, can scaffold students learning from factual knowledge and skills to real-life application of SEL.
- Modeling: Teachers can maximize student observational learning by modeling social and emotional skills use through demonstration, narration, and their own use of SEL.
- Practice: Teachers can strengthen student’s learning through repetition by having students recall, repeat, and rehearse SEL knowledge and skills.
- Transfer: Teachers can make student’s SEL more accessible in a range of situations by having students practice SEL knowledge and skills in and with a variety of settings, people, and emotional states and by helping students apply SEL in real-life school and peer situations.
- Elaboration: Teachers can strengthen student’s SEL connections by providing to or eliciting from students rich, detailed information about social and emotional content.
- Validation: Teachers can strengthen student’s self-efficacy and sense of identity by validating — through acknowledgement, making space, elevating, and celebrating — student’s emotions, experiences, and perspectives.
Read more about the Pedagogies of SEL in this new paper: Zieher, A., Bailey, C., Cipriano, C., McNaboe, T., Smith, K., & Strambler, M. (In Press) A Framework for Social and Emotional Learning Pedagogy. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy.
4. How can all students benefit from SEL?
Students’ identities significantly impact their experience with SEL. Cultural background, lived experiences, and learning needs influence how students engage with SEL curricula and how they apply SEL skills. However, most SEL research and practice has not centered marginalized student identities, and in doing so, is missing a critical opportunity to adequately address the needs of all students. When we use the term marginalized, we are referring to students with minority racial, ethnic, linguistic, gender, sexual, socioeconomic, and disability identities and the intersections there within.
SEL programming can greatly support students of marginalized identities. In fact, SEL can help to alleviate the risk of mental health challenges that often disproportionately impact marginalized students due to bullying, trauma, and systemic inequality. To truly benefit all students, SEL programming must be designed around the unique needs of students of varying races, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, socioeconomic status, and disability statuses. Educators can use principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) in doing so, building flexible, responsive, and affirming curricula to ensure that all students have the opportunity to access and benefit from the SEL content.
A forthcoming chapter in Routledge’s Handbook of Equity, Asset-Based, Race- Reimagined Theories, Methods, and Practice discusses the importance of centering marginalized student’s identities in SEL to ensure that all students can meaningfully engage with and benefit from SEL curricula.
Cipriano, C., Ahmad, E., McCarthy, M., Ha., C. & Ross, A. (Under Review). Centering Student Identity in Universal School-Based Social and Emotional Learning. In Lopez & Gray (Eds.) Handbook of Equity, Asset-Based, Race-Reimagined Theories, Methods, and Practice. Routledge
Read more about universal design for SEL here: Rappolt-Schlichtmann, G., Cipriano, C., Robinson, K.H., & Boucher, A. (2024). Universal design for social and emotional learning. Hall, T.E., Robinson, K. H. and Gordon, D. (Eds.) Universal design for learning in the classroom: Practical applications (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
5. Can SEL promote racial equity and social justice?
While social and emotional learning (SEL) can be leveraged to advance educational equity, our prior work has demonstrated that the field’s understanding of the extent to which racially minoritized students are accessing and benefiting from SEL is limited. As such, there is a need to incorporate data collection strategies aimed at analyzing the root causes of disparities, engaging with various stakeholders (e.g., students, families, educators) and to co-develop programming, policies, and practices that address issues of equity and trauma, and are solution-focused and culturally/linguistically responsive.
Our current research-practice partnership in collaboration with Trajectory of Hope and the Urban Assembly aims to understand what it takes to really do SEL work in schools that’s sustainable towards the end of promoting racial equity and social justice in schools. We introduced a full-time staff of SEL Specialists (SELS) into each school to co-learn from within. Six key takeaways were identified for how SELS ensure SEL assessment tools are harnessed for actionable and sustainable change in schools.
This includes:
- leveraging the school’s SEL history, context, and vision,
- enhancing SEL data literacy among stakeholders to foster healthy schools,
- supporting home-grown SEL goals, tracking, and accountability tailored to each school’s needs,
- applying an equity-focused, assets-based approach for interpreting data and advancing SEL and equity initiatives,
- prioritizing educator and youth voices, fostering vulnerability and community-building, and
- cultivating unique relationships with school stakeholders and increasing SEL-related buy-in.
With these six key aspects emphasized, SEL assessment can promote racial equity and social justice in classrooms.
To learn more about Project Flourish visit www.projectflourish.education.
Lucas, M., & Cipriano, C., (2023, Nov 13). Can SEL assessments support racial equity in schools? Demystifying the disrupter role of the SEL Specialist. American Educational Research Association SEL Special Interest Group. Available here.
6. How can we support expansive gender and sex identity in SEL?
How gender and sexual identity is assessed directly shapes how students are supported in our nation’s schools. Despite the recognition of gender and sexual diversity, calls for more inclusive science, and recommendations from national research associations and societies to incorporate and emphasize the voices of individuals with diverse gender and minority sexual identities, the majority of studies exploring gender and sex disparities in education have relied heavily on the assumption of a gender binary. The resulting omission of diverse gender identities from educational research is troubling.
To address this area of need, Dr. DeFrance and colleagues' new paper in the American Psychologist summarizes the opportunities for and constraints surrounding inclusive evaluation of gender – and by association – sexual identity in educational research. We begin with a brief review of common methods used to assess gender identities for children in elementary school, including the strengths and limitations of each. We next contextualize these measures by outlining the current state-level barriers to including diversity in assessments of gender, perpetuating an inability to represent students across the gender and sex spectrum. In highlighting the best available practices and the structural systems of oppression realized through state-level policies, we conclude with a call to action to inspire the evolution of best practices in the service of all students.
DeFrance, K., Lucas, M., Anders, S., & Cipriano, C. (2024). Measuring gender in elementary school-aged children: promising practices and barriers to moving beyond the binary. American Psychologist.
7. How does Equity intersect with SEL?
There remain significant questions as to whether evidence-based SEL is in fact effective for all students, and what constitutes effectiveness in the context of educational equity. Scholars are increasingly questioning whether USB SEL is accessible to racially-, ethnically-, linguistically-, gender-, sexually, or ability diverse student populations. Furthermore, there is increasingly greater disagreement as to what SEL’s role should be in advancing equity. In the forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning, 2nd Edition (Guilford Press, Summer 2024), Drs. Cipriano and Strambler attend to these tensions explicitly and offer a framework for disentangling the intersection of equity and SEL.
Indeed, approaches to achieving equity in SEL vary widely – from efforts to enhance educational systems to calling for the complete restructuring or abolishment of such systems. Drs. Cipriano and Strambler organize three approaches to equity in SEL (skills-based, justice-focused, adult development), framed by the expectation of learner variability (specific to gender- race- ethnicity- language – and disability- identities), and intersecting on four essential elements of SEL depicted at the center of the figure: competencies, pedagogies, implementation, and outcomes, respectively.
Guidance on how to identify unique challenges to, and opportunities for, advancing equity with, through, and in SEL are discussed.
Citation: Cipriano, C. & Strambler, M. (2024). On SEL and Equity. In Durlak, J., Dominitrov, C., & Mahoney, J. (Eds) Handbook of SEL Theory, Research, and Practice: The Evolution of a Field (2nd Edition). Access the pre-print here
Download and share the fully formatted brief here.
In addition, check out these 5 Science Snapshots to share with your school community
These artifacts also provide a sneak preview into the Education Collaboratory’s upcoming Summer Learning Series, which will launch in June of 2024. Find all six artifacts and additional free resources for sharing, here!