Selecting the Right SEL Assessment for Your Students and School Community
By Kevin Brown
July 19, 2021 (Republished January 23, 2025)
As schools receive an influx of dollars for COVID-19 recovery efforts, the topic of social-emotional learning has taken center stage. With the pandemic exposing gaps in the monitoring and assessment of students’ social-emotional health, schools are being encouraged to implement programs to better serve students and promote enhanced mental well-being. However, with an abundance of assessments and programs available, leaders and educators are tasked with trying to determine which programs and assessments will deliver the outcomes their students need. These individuals must understand how to identify a high-quality assessment and evaluate its ability to accomplish their needs for information about their students’ social-emotional health and their intervention program’s effectiveness.
High-quality assessments without question all have (1) comprehensive User Guides & Technical Manuals documenting the reliability, validity, and fairness of their scores and (2) independently peer reviewed publications certifying the assessments function as reported in their technical manuals. Not all educators are steeped in technical aspects of assessments, but high-quality assessment manuals do an excellent job of translating the meaning of technical indices into practical actions!
Helping Educators Identify the Best SEL Assessments
Although many educators may wish to implement effective SEL programs and assessments, there is little guidance on how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different options. One of the few resources available for public use is CASEL’s detailed SEL assessment guide which provides an interactive tool for practitioners to select and use SEL assessments, although this guide only includes assessments published before 2018 and a number of new assessments have been developed and validated since then. There are three key components of its guide:
Prepare to assess.
Select an assessment.
Use assessment data.
For each of these components, CASEL provides details on the most critical considerations for program developers and administrators. For example, when preparing to select an SEL assessment, CASEL suggests first framing the overall SEL effort and how the role of the assessment fits. If it is meant to be formative, the assessment should produce data that can guide instruction, whereas summative assessments should focus on determining what has already occurred. Central to an effective assessment is also making sure it evaluates the competencies of importance to the user and produces data that is actionable and relevant. Its tool also provides an assessment catalog, asking the user to indicate specific competencies they want to measure, which grade level(s) will take the assessment, and the respondent group(s) that will evaluate the students. It then provides a list of assessments and the full profile for users to determine what fits their needs best. Following such guidance will enable schools to effectively implement assessments and truly develop beneficial development programs for their students.
The California-based Project Cal-Well student mental health program further demonstrates the need to understand how to effectively use an assessment to evaluate student SEL. WestEd released a brief outlining considerations for how best to administer student SEL assessments during distance-learning, a reality that dominated education for much of the past year. While mental health became a critical focus, many schools were unprepared to implement SEL and emotional-behavioral assessments and programs during such unprecedented times, especially if schools had no history with these programs. WestEd outlined guiding principles to help schools improve the efficacy of their SEL programs given that little information regarding how to identify the best programs for implementation was unavailable.
Assessment Evaluation Is Critical for Successful SEL Program Implementation
While there are many assessments available, there are very few resources to help school leaders and educators identify which tools and approaches would work best for their students’ needs. CASEL’s guide represents a significant step in the right direction toward evaluating the quality of the products themselves, something many organizations and programs have failed to offer. SEL is undoubtedly a critical piece to improving education and enhancing student outcomes, but the success of SEL programs is fully reliant upon informed implementation and the right tools. By leveraging such guides, schools and educators will be equipped to develop a strong SEL curriculum and mental health monitoring system to ensure students receive the attention, focus, and development required for a truly brighter future.
Expert Insight: Words from Dr. Stephen Elliott, Mickelson Foundation Professor at Arizona State Univ.
Before selecting an assessment to screen students’ social emotional health, consider asking the vendor and/or assessment authors the following questions:
Is the item content of the student, teacher, and/or parent assessments aligned with all 5 of the domains defined by the CASEL Competency Framework? If they say it is aligned, ask if the alignment decision was subjective or based on actual empirical studies. (Virtually every assessment provider is claiming their assessment is aligned to the CASEL Competency Framework but does not provide details about the degree of alignment nor method. Note that very few assessment authors have done the factor analytic work needed to support the claim that their alignment is evidence-based!)
Does the assessment measure the whole social emotional child? That is, does the assessment measure desired SEL competencies such as self-management and relationship skills, but also measure potential emotional behavior concerns such as anxiety, sadness, or bulling type behaviors? (Note many SEL assessments have intentionally been designed to only measure the positive or desired behaviors of students, but researchers have consistently documented that low SEL competencies are not a strong indicator of emotional behavior concerns. If one only assesses SEL competencies, you are likely to miss 15% to 20% of students with emotional behavior concerns!)
How are the resulting scores of the SEL assessment interpreted? By comparing students to other students (i.e., norm-referenced approach) or by comparing students’ scores to established performance standards (i.e., criterion-referenced approach)? Almost all currently published SEL assessments use a norm-referenced approach to score interpretation where students are compared to a norm group of students, with some being above and others below the statistically derived average in comparison to the norm group. The demographics of this norm group are very important to the meaning of the scores. A few SEL assessments provide both norm-referenced scores and criterion-referenced scores. When the criterion-referenced scores have been aligned with a guiding competency framework such as that of CASEL, then the interpretation is potentially enhanced allowing for a developmental interpretation where all students can be at desired levels, thus eliminating statistical winners and losers.
Are the assessment scores and their interpretation fair? Most SEL assessments do not address this element, yet the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014) tout it as a key form of evidence alongside reliability and validity evidence. Fairness is a complex topic, but it is sufficient to say that this involves more than item bias. Fair scores are not the same as equal scores!
Note: We would like to thank Dr. Stephen Elliott and the SSIS CoLab team for contributions to this post and their continued study of SEL assessments and interventions. For more information about their team, research, and the SSIS SEL Brief + Mental Health Scales assessment, visit: https://ssiscolab.com/
