Resources

We applied value-added models to student surveys in the CORE Districts to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can be used to measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. We found that classrooms differ in their effect on students’ growth in self-reported SEL—even after accounting for school-level effects.

Using the first large-scale panel surveys of students on SEL, we produced school-level value-added measures by grade for growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness. We found substantive differences across schools in SEL growth, with magnitudes of differences similar to those for growth in academic achievement, but weaker goodness of fit and smaller across-school variance, suggesting caution in interpreting such measures as causal impacts of schools on SEL.

We analyzed the psychometric properties of items from California's CORE Districts' annual SEL survey. We compared items' functionality across grades, compared student outcomes from IRT models and the classical approach, made suggestions on approaches to modeling and scaling the SEL survey data, and identified items, by grade, that do not contribute positively to measurement of each outcome. We also discussed policy implications in using SEL measures among educators, administrators, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

We examined whether rapid guessing behaviors varied by grade, subject, and teacher, and we evaluated if rapid guessing influenced teacher value-added estimates. We found that rapid guessing occurs frequently enough that educators should be mindful of its effect on the interpretations of student test results, but rapid guessing did not appear to affect estimates of teacher performance.