Linking social and emotional learning standards to the WCSD Social–Emotional Competency Assessment: A Rasch approach.

Abstract

Growing interest in understanding the role of students' social-emotional competence for school success necessitates valid measures for large-scale use. We provide validity evidence for the 40-item Washoe County School District Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (WCSD-SECA), a student self-report measure that came from a researcher-practitioner partnership. The WCSD's social and emotional learning standards, which detail when and at what grade students are expected to express different competencies, contributed to hypotheses about the social-emotional competency levels targeted by the WCSD-SECA items. Across two survey years, Rasch analyses showed that the empirical item ordering aligned with the expected ordering to varying degrees, that items better targeted students at low to middle competency levels, and that some items showed differential item functioning across grades and gender/ race-ethnicity. Future research can use similar methods to theorize and test how items array along latent competency dimensions in general and for particular subgroups. Especially when accomplished within a researcher-practitioner partnership, such efforts can mutually inform district social and emotional learning standards, helping document student progress in a locally and practically relevant way. By making the WCSD-SECA items freely available, we make it easy for researchers and practitioners to complete future refinements and adaptations. Impact and ImplicationsWe provide three types of validity evidence for the 40-item Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (SECA), a measure developed through a researcher-practitioner partnership with a large Western school district. The items better targeted students at low to middle competency levels, often (not always) were consistent with district standards, and sometimes functioned differently by students' grade levels and gender/race-ethnicity.

Empirical benchmarks for changes in social and emotional skills over time

“…Researchers and practitioners also need to bear in mind that the four constructs we examine are not necessarily defined the same way by surveys used outside of CORE, and that items might therefore look quite different (e.g., Crowder et al, 2019). More concretely, most students outside California do not take the CORE surveys and the CORE surveys differ from those used in other districts.…”

“…Regardless of arguments for and against self-report measures, they are used widely by developmental and educational researchers, due in part to their ease of administration (Crowder et al, 2019). In fact, most of what we know about how students develop SE skills almost certainly comes from self-report measures.…”

Fairness and Comparability in Achievement Motivation Items: A Differential Item Functioning Analysis

“…However, despite the presence of small to moderate DIF based on the change in R2 and % Δβ1, all DIF was classified as negligible, and Lambert et al (2018) concluded that DIF did not have a significant impact on test scores. Crowder et al (2019) evaluated DIF between White and Hispanic/Latinx students on a 40-item social–emotional competency assessment that included four items related to self-management of goals. In their sample of over 13,000 students in grades 5, 6, 8, and 11, no DIF was flagged on those four goal-related items.…”

Using child rights education to infuse a social justice framework into universal programming

“…These items were chosen by accessing a freely available bank of SEL questions, then choosing items that mapped onto social skill domains teachers and students reported as important to them. At the time stakeholders accessed this database, items had been used across several school districts and tested for readability and usability (Crowder, Gordon, Brown, Davidson, & Domitrovich, 2019; Davidson et al., 2018). The bank from which these items were originally retrieved was primarily utilized with 5th–11th grade students (Davidson et al., 2018); therefore, teachers reviewed the items for readability, and the measure was run through an online readability software to ensure that it matched a fourth grade reading level.…”