Evidence provides the basis for determining whether and how SEL benefits the students it’s intended to support.
In the absence of evidence, SEL runs the risk of being “everything” and “nothing” in the history of initiatives that fizzled out in effectiveness.
How It Started
In 2023 researchers at Yale University released the state of the evidence for social and emotional learning, a registered report of the empirical evidence of effectiveness for school-based SEL interventions through 2020.
Here’s what we learned:
SEL drives student success and fosters personal growth.
On average, students who participate in SEL programs perform better academically, feel better, have healthier behaviors, and report feeling safer at school. As SEL takes root, its outcomes blossom into improved academic achievement, social emotional skills, perceptions of school climate and safety, civic attitudes and behaviors, and prosocial behavior, and reductions in experiences of stress, anxiety, bullying, and depressive symptoms.
Teachers are at the heart of effective SEL.
Classroom teachers are the most effective facilitators of SEL programs during the school day. Although the training of teachers is varied and minimal, in general, programs have the strongest effects on student outcomes when classroom teachers instruct the programs.
SEL programs are wildly diverse in terms of what they teach, the theory they’re based upon, the implementation procedures they take, and outcomes on which they’re focused. It is really important to be specific about what SEL program you are referring to, either by name, or type, when describing it.
Specifics and context matters.
How you teach is just as important as what you teach.
Programs that were taught in a way that was sequenced, active, focused, and explicit (SAFE) enhanced SEL effectiveness. The sequence of Teaching SEL in the sequence of intrapersonal skills before interpersonal skills- emotion skills before social skills - was more effective than teaching the other way around.
More family engagement will grow SEL effectiveness.
SEL programs produced positive effects for students in general, despite less than 1/3 of programs including families in their programming nor offering tiered programming for students who would benefit from additional instructional support. There is a big opportunity for SEL programs to explicitly engage families as well as provide additional content for school-based mental health providers to support all students to access and benefit from SEL in school.
How It's Going
Under Construction coming this fall
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