Linking Social and Emotional Learning Standards to the Social Emotional Competency Assessment (SECA)

Abstract

School districts across the United States are developing systemic, district-wide approaches to support students’ social and emotional learning (SEL), due to the increasingly recognized role that students’ social-emotional competencies (SECs) play in their academic success (Domitrovich et al., 2017; Kendziora & Osher, 2016; Mahoney et al., 2017). Such initiatives have increased the need for cost-effective measures of students’ SECs that are feasible for large-scale use, embedded in scholarly literature, and aligned to local needs (Stecher & Hamilton, 2014). This brief describes evidence for one such measure, the Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (SECA), which is a self-report assessment of students’ SECs that can be used from late elementary to high school (Crowder et al., 2018; Davidson et al., 2018; Schamberg et al., 2017). The measure was developed in the context of a researcher-practitioner partnership that provided the opportunity to align the measure not only with theory and literature about core SECs – and the widely-used Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning five broad domains (CASEL 5; Weissberg et al., 2015) – but also the school district’s SEL standards. This brief shows how such alignment informs us about how well the measure operates and also offers insights into the standards and underlying theory and practice (see Crowder et al., 2018 for the full paper on which this brief is based).