Session: Using Social Emotional Learning to Ensure Healthy Development for All Youth: Assessment, Intervention, and Evaluation (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

The American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare created the Grand Challenges Initiative to “identify ambitious yet achievable goals for society that mobilize the profession, capture the public's imagination, and require innovation and breakthroughs in science and practice to achieve” (Uehara, et al., 2014). One Grand Challenge, “Ensuring Healthy Development for All Youth,” aims to reduce the incidence of behavioral health problems by 20% within a decade (Hawkins et al., 2015). To achieve population-wide reductions in behavioral health problems, we must ensure equitable access to effective preventive interventions in routine settings.

One form of school-based prevention are Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs. SEL is “the processes of developing social and emotional competencies in children” such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making (Weissberg et al., 2013). SEL programs can be cost beneficial to implement and, when implemented well, have been shown to be effective in achieving a broad array of important child outcomes, including reducing the likelihood of anxiety, delinquency, and truancy, and promoting the likelihood of academic achievement (e.g., Durlak et al, 2011; Flay & Allred, 2003; Greenberg et al., 2003). SEL programs provide “role expansion” opportunities for school social workers (Johnson & McKay-Jackson, 2017; Frey et al., 2013; Kelly et al., 2010), in which they can help all students achieve SEL standards (Lindsey et al., 2014) and become central contributors to the Grand Challenge goal of Ensuring Healthy Development for All Youth.

TOOLBOX (Collin, 2015) is an SEL program that has spread to over 40 school districts in Northern California. Although TOOLBOX is popular, it has not yet been tested scientifically. Testing such a program requires understanding how to pragmatically and soundly measure outcomes and exploring how varying implementation contexts and behaviors relate to them. This symposium includes a collection of studies using data from a quasi-experimental examination of TOOLBOX to address practice-relevant questions related to scaling up social-emotional learning programs in schools.

The first paper compares social-emotional indicators on report cards to scores on a standardized behavior rating scale, to determine which measure has higher internal reliability, shows lower intraclass correlation, and minimizes group differences. We learn, for example, that the standardized measure used in this district (the DESSA-Mini) captures less teacher-variance than the report card indicators the district created. The second paper uses the Implementation Leadership Scale (Aarons et al., 2014) and various measures of implementation dosage to explain youth outcomes. Findings suggest that teacher-reported implementation leadership and dosage both relate to youth social-emotional outcomes. The third paper examines how youth individual characteristics (e.g., gender, age, primary language, special education placement, poverty status) relate to the effects of TOOLBOX on social-emotional growth. We find that TOOLBOX is equally beneficial to most sub-groups of students.

Together, these studies suggest that using standardized assessment tools, planning for a high-quality implementation, and carefully evaluating differential effects are important to using SEL to ensure healthy development for all youth. The symposium will conclude with comments and discussion facilitation by a senior scientist.