Bridgeport RULER Evaluation

Measuring social and emotional learning implementation in a research-practice partnership

“…However, when the superintendent left his role mid-way through the 2013–14 school year, the new superintendent was so enthusiastic about the work that she charged the partnership to expand the work districtwide; additional funding was sought and acquired to do so. The overall goal of the partnership was to: (a) promote learning, healthy interpersonal relationships, and sound decision-making; (b) foster safe, supportive, and respectful classrooms and schools; (c) utilize measures relevant to these goals that can be used to measure progress, gage impact and guide improvements; and (d) create a model for school improvement that actively engages all stakeholders ( Strambler and Meyer, 2018 ). Table 1 describes the focus of the 5-year Yale-BPS SEL Partnership; related materials are available on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/nwzrs/ .…”

“…We used a variety of implementation measures and other measures over the course of the Yale-BPS SEL Partnership to balance rigor, feasibility, and sensitivity to change, and to account for potential bias. Figure 1 depicts the initiative’s theory of change and the measures used at each stage ( Strambler and Meyer, 2018 ). As shown in Figure 1 , the partnership developed two types of SEL implementation measures: SEL implementation logs and SEL implementation surveys, which are discussed below, along with other SEL implementation measurement approaches that we considered but did not use.…”