SEL Assessments

New assessment guide released today The SEL Assessment Guide from The Assessment Work Group (AWG) is now live! Released today, the online guide: Offers advice to districts and schools on how to choose and use student SEL competency assessments; Provides a curated catalog of 23 assessments currently used in practice; and Features real-world examples of how practitioners are using SEL competency assessments. The catalog provides detailed information about measures of SEL knowledge, skills, and mindsets that are currently being used in schools or afterschool settings. Users can search by: SEL competency (such as self-management and social awareness); Grade level; and Assessment type (student self-report, teacher-staff survey, peer survey, performance measure, family survey). “With this guide, we are trying to help educators determine which currently available SEL competency assessments are right for them, based on their approach to SEL and how they are looking to use their data."  Jeremy Taylor, CASEL’s Director of Assessment and Continuous Improvement An accompanying Practitioner Guidance Report, created jointly by the AWG and RAND Corporation, also aims to helps schools and districts choose and use SEL competency assessments. As one school counselor expressed, "This is better than anything I have accessed and I'm so thankful and impressed. This is going to save many practitioners time in research trying to find/compare SEL assessments.” The Assessment Work Group is supported by the Funders Collaborative for Innovative Measurement (FCIM), which includes 15 private foundations. FCIM also is supporting two related projects. This suite of online tools provides common SEL language and enhanced access to assessment instruments with the goal of creating practices that promote intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies. Learn more. The Taxonomy Project Developed by the EASEL Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, it showcases the points of alignment and divergence across SEL frameworks, in a way that enables users to both identify common ground and to see what is distinct within any particular framework. The RAND Assessment Finder The tool lists more than 200 assessments of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and higher-order cognitive competencies, including associated descriptive and evaluative information. These assessments include those found in research or in current practice. This tool enables practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to explore what assessments are available and obtain 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. The scope of RAND’s Assessment Finder is not limited to measures currently being used in schools, and includes measures of higher-order cognitive competencies. The Assessment Work Group is a multidisciplinary collaborative of leading education researchers and practitioners, managed by CASEL with leaders from the RAND Corporation, Harvard University, the California CORE Districts, Transforming Education, xSEL Labs, and several universities, nonprofit organizations, and school districts across the country. ‌ ‌