One of the opportunities afforded by a clean-sheet approach to education is the integration of a variety of tools that are otherwise difficult to fit in. One of these tools is Social-Emotional Well-being or SEL. Research has proven time and again that the social and emotional well-being of a student greatly affects academic performance. Therefore, in the presence of many effective tools of analysis, it behooves us to keep an eye on the social and emotional well-being of our students.
This has recently been made easier by the US Department of Education through grants to the California CORE Districts to develop open-source tools around SEL. One of these tools was built and tested across the four school districts in over 1200 schools with over 480,000 students. We have adapted that tool to echoes in a way that allows us to produce a new SEL score on each student after 9 days of participation in any aspect of our curriculum. If the student is active on echoes 5 days per week, the system will generate a new score every two weeks.
The echoes implementation of SEL consists of three phases: 1) scoring, 2) suggesting interventions, and 3) delivering interventions. As of the summer of 2024, we have crossed into phase 2 of our implementation. We hope to complete phase 2 during 2024 and begin working on phase 3 in 2025.
Significant analysis of the tool can be seen in the .pdf documents linked on this page.
Please answer how often you did the following during the past 30 days. During the past 30 days…
(Almost Never, Once in a While, Sometimes, Often, Almost All the Time)
Please indicate how true each of the following statements is for you:
(Almost Never, Once in a While, Sometimes, Often, Almost All the Time)
How confident are you about the following at school?
(Almost Never, Once in a While, Sometimes, Often, Almost All the Time)
Not Carefully At All, Slightly Carefully, Somewhat Carefully, Quite Carefully, Extremely Carefully
Almost Never, Once in a while, Sometimes, Often, Almost all the time
Did Not Get Along At All, Got Along A Little Bit, Got Along Somewhat, Got Along Pretty Well, Got Along Extremely Well
Not At All Clearly, Slightly Clearly, Somewhat Clearly, Quite Clearly, Extremely Clearly
Not At All Respectful, Slightly Respectful, Somewhat Respectful, Quite Respectful, Extremely Respectful
Measuring Social-Emotional Learning Through Student Surveys in the CORE Districts: A Pragmatic Approach to
Validity and Reliability
Measuring Social Emotional: Learning Best Practices and Lessons Learned for SEL Assessment
Download this CORE districts’ study to discover a method for assessing and developing social-emotional skills that are essential for student success in college, career, and life.