Walgrove Social Emotional Growth Assessment

During my 25+ years in education, I have often heard the adage, "You can tell what people value by what they measure." So, then, why, in education, have we no reliable measure for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and/or Social Emotional Growth. 

Why do school districts across the globe use as measures of their efficacy, in the area of SEL, discipline referrals? Especially when those referrals only apply to some students some of the time and do nothing to offer true insight into the behaviors -- among both the students and the adults -- that led to those referrals?

I wanted to really know how our students were faring, and I wanted to really know if the adults, like me, were meeting the social emotional needs of our students. 

So, I created and piloted an assessment. Along the way, I invited parents, staff and students to participate.  

The 10 steps we took:

1. Make a list of SEL skills, using as references varied existing tools and the values of our school
2. Think of a four-point rubric akin to a Likert scale yet also in line with typical grading systems
3. Use mathematical modeling to arrive at a fitting scoring formula (there is a second page of the assessment wherein the teacher rates the student using the same criteria, then we compare the student and teacher scores to arrive at a self-awareness score and then apply our proprietary formula to figure the final score)
4. Test the assessment on a student in Grade 2 (with his parents' permission)
5. Collaborate with a 40-year teacher to create a version intended for students in grades TK-2
6. Pilot the original upper-grade assessment with a volunteer teacher in Grade 4 (pre-test in Fall, 2018 and post-test in Spring, 2019)
7. After being pleased with the results, scale it up and pilot it with approximately 100 students in grades 3-5 (pre-test in Fall, 2020)
8. Analyze the results of the 2020 pre-test to see how it fared as a tool
9. Juxtapose the data to another more traditional measure (office referrals) to uncover surprising information, such as unconscious bias
10. Share the results with staff and ask important questions about unconscious bias