By Clark McKown A colleague of mine in the education community and I were discussing SEL assessment a couple of years ago. Her district had recently administered SELweb EE, our SEL assessment system, to assess children in first through third
By Clark McKown My colleagues and I think a lot about how to use SEL assessment data for continuous improvement to make life better for teachers and the kids they serve, and for researchers who care about student social-emotional outcomes.
By Clark McKown (Originally appeared in the Transforming Education blog on July 11, 2018.) Multi-tiered systems of support, or MTSS, are based on a simple and positive premise: We should use data to teach in ways that build on student
By Clark McKown Most people agree that children are better off when they have the skills they need to interact effectively with others, form positive relationships, and participate successfully in school and life. These are social-emotional skills, and the process
By Clark McKown In a time of divisive public discourse, it’s nice to know that parents, teachers, and others agree that the abilities to interact successfully with others and to make and maintain positive relationships are valuable skills to be
By Clark McKown Many SEL programs, when taught with sufficient quality and intensity, produce measurable improvements in student social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Those measurable benefits are summarized nicely in a meta-analysis of the impact of SEL programs on student
By Clark McKown So you want to assess your students’ SEL skills. Before you get started, please keep in mind an important fact. Assessments are dumb. They don’t know how you’re going to use them and they have no say
By Clark McKown When you boil it down, an educational test is a sample of behavior that is evaluated to make a judgment about a child’s academic strengths and needs. To test reading fluency, for example, a child reads a
By Clark McKown We all know that success in school and life depends on more than book smarts. There is a lot of talk these days about what skills, other than IQ, matters, and what educators can do to nurture
